A Christmas U-Turn

I like these trees, and the songs but I'm not really sure what they are all about....

This week was another chapter in the long series of last minute adventures of Gut Girl.

We had a very nice low-key Christmas. We took Ellie to her (and her daddy's) first Christmas church service on the 24th, read Ellie Twas the Night Before Christmas and had a nice day opening some presents (even though Ellie had no idea why there were so many toys in our living room).

Ellie is most fond of her new potty even though she doesn't quite get it. She (and her mom) were so excited about it that they had to try it out in the living room:

And the bathroom:

And my bowel is this big......

This year was a nice prelude to what I expect will be a full-on Christmas with an almost-three-year old next year. Baby steps.

Our original plan was to take off on Wednesday to spend a week with my parents in Maine and let Ellie have a nice long stretch with her cousins instead of the mad dash visits that we usually do.

Wednesday morning we spent about three hours getting ready with a week's worth of stuff to take the Infusion Operation on the road. List after list of stuff was packed up and loaded, tetris-style, into the car.

At about noon we loaded Ellie and Gus in and made our way to Children's to pick up some ostomy supplies to get us through until the delivery comes next week. They are very good to us when we run into a snag between orders especially when Ellie's ostomy is misbehaving the way it has over the last two months.

Out comes Abby from the Children's revolving door and my cell phone rings:

'Gib it's mom. I have a cold, your sister has a doozie and the kids all have runny noses. Do you still think that you should come?'

And with that our plans changed and we headed home. We will get to Maine as soon as everyone is healthy but with another surgery in the works for the sometime in the next few weeks (we hope) we don't want to delay it because of an avoidable cold.

Total elapsed trip: 1 hour 12 minutes, including a stop for a sandwich on the way home. A big adventure.

We spent yesterday and today playing around the house:




but quickly learned that we would go batty if we stayed here for the next week. I don't work again until the 7th of January so we need to go somewhere for some new fun before we start in on the long stretch of winter. so today made plans for a short trip to Vermont to stay with Abby's brother-in-law's family at their house in northern Vermont.

Maine, Vermont it's all snowy so the bags stayed packed and we will load them up again tomorrow for a two night visit.

Ellie's teenage cousin will be there and Ellie adores her so we should be in good shape for a few days.

Maybe Ellie will get her first ride on a sled....