"I'm just not used to the clamor"

... said Simon last night as he wrapped up an entire weekend at home (no hospital reprieve for the weary) and the kids shouted and sprinted circles around the house because .... welcome to winter.

(stolen from a dated Insta but I love it more with every passing day)

(the wall had totally peeled off due to a leaky window??? Simon fixed it right up like a boss. I thought we should hire someone but obviously I stand corrected until the end of time.)

Sometimes I daydream about the end of residency (18.65 months - no, I'm not counting ... I'm obsessing) and I think real hard about some aspects of these years that I'll miss.

And then I think harder.

I dig deep and with a little help from my inner Pollyanna I'm able to come up with a few things and one of them is how much we appreciate when Simon is home. Not that I'll never not appreciate him being home but as five motherhating weeks of night float loom in the very near future a weekend of no call felt downright glutinous. Glutinous? I'm keeping it.

We didn't do anything crazy but we (he) got a lot of house stuff done and we (he) decked the living room with our faux fir. Julia is really into Christmas and asks every five minutes if Santa is still in his chair at the mall (reason for the season, what?) and isn't our Christmas tree just so great/pretty/beautiful? So the ceremonial put together of the three piece pre-lit was especially enjoyable this year with narration by Julia, garbled parroting of her narration by Sebastian, and utter indifference by Theo.

Oh and we pulled out the nativity scene for the first time since our first married Christmas ...

This set had survived 20+ years and seven children under my parents roof but four years and only two showings under the care of the Pattons and we have a little something for your nightmares.

(They've since been super glued and you can't even tell, I promise.)

We have a lot of leftover paint from the living room and so Simon painted the bathroom at my request and we bid the happiest of farewells to the citrus walls and I sewed three different curtains (the first two being too short because me and measuring are a match made in Loveland) and really darkened the space up with my choice of navy fabric. I'll show you - look forward to that post coming live and direct sometime this year. Har har har.

Ah. The biggest news is that Theo is finally a mobile little human.

I am mostly anti-crawling because people tend to frown on children crawling around public arenas (hospitals, airports, parking lots - it's weird) and the second a baby discovers that he or she can crawl ... game over. So over. They want to crawl everywhere and eat all the cigarette butts at the park and make you look downright negligent. But Theo had become the most miserable little boy just sitting.

And sitting. And sitting. And he had resigned himself to happily sitting for a mere seven minutes a day (this blog is littered with exaggerations but seven minutes? seven minutes is not one of them) and then whine-crying until I held him all of his other waking hours and it was starting to thin my will to live. I even wrote a post about it but then he started crining and I never got it posted and no, I'm not rushing him because he is eleven months old and Sebastian was sprinting at this age and let the comparison games begin. They've begun. And you're behind, Theodore.

I can see the care written all over your mug.

But now he is doing the sitty scoot with a sprinkle of army crawl and he knows to head straight for the stairs and the bathroom whenever he is set loose and bring it on. Bring it all on.

So that was the weekend. Mostly.

And as a reward for skimming through all of that ... for any single readers (or not single - I still did my weekly laugh out loud during el clip) out there ... my boo Caitlin shot this my way earlier. Hilario. But she says it's the truth.

And these are grossly addicting. Don't make them. Just don't.