It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

I was feeling very lazy last Thanksgiving weekend so I wasn’t sure if I would be able to make myself crawl into the coat closet/storage of doom in order to haul out the Christmas decorations. Sunday afternoon, I shut my eyes against what would be another very sad Chargers defeat and found myself dozing off with Katelyn on one side of me and Jacob on the other side of me. All the while thinking, “I guess we’ll take the Christmas stuff out NEXT weekend.”

When I woke up, Alfred was no where around. I heard Christmas music coming from the garage which could only mean one thing – he was in the garage taking down the outdoor Christmas decorations. The kids and I ventured outside and, oh, how their faces lit up when they saw the candy cane lights lining our lawn! Our front door was lined with a Christmas ornaments garland, to which Jacob kept exclaiming “Ball! Ball!” as he tried to pull each off of the garland. With all the holiday excitement in the air, how could I NOT bring out the rest of the decorations? So off I went… through the jackets, over the mountain of shoes, past the Halloween décor, over the miscellaneous “I’ve-been-looking-for-these!” to the coveted Christmas decorations. As I brought each box out, Katelyn became more and more excited! She went straight to work on decorating the Christmas tree while Desiree and I decorated the rest of our house.

Katelyn barely got the front, bottom half of the tree decorated before she gave up and insisted that she and Daddy needed robes ASAP!! And hot chocolate! And they needed to sit in front of the barely decorated Christmas tree in their warm and snuggly robes and sip their hot chocolates. That girl is hi-LA-rious!

This being Jacob’s first Christmas being mobile, he went around the house trying to undo all the decorating we had done the way only a little boy could. Pulling stockings off the fire mantle, taking all the music-making-stuffed-animals and throwing them on the ground, pulling the ornaments off the tree, etc. I always marvel at how different he is from his sisters. So much more mischievous.

Speaking of being mischievous, Jacob really pushed the limits of my patience the other night:

• I was cooking dinner when he asked for some oranges. I peel an orange, put the slices in a Tupperware bowl and let him have at it. When I came to check on him, he had squeezed a couple of slices so that the coffee table had a nice layer of orange juice floating on top of it.
• As I was cleaning up the orange juice, he proceeds to rub the orange rinds all over his face. I take him into the bathroom to wash him up, put him back down and then go back to check on the dinner I was cooking.
• As I was cutting up some meat for Katelyn’s plate, Jacob climbs on one of the chairs and teeters on the edge of it! I drop everything (knife included) in a huge clatter and dive action-hero style to save him from falling off the chair. Put him back on the ground and get back to work on the plate I’m making for Katelyn.
• Not even two minutes later, I hear glass shatter and look up to see Jacob on top of the step-stool that we had put next to the fire mantle in order to put up some Christmas decorations. How the heck did he get up there so fast?! He had knocked over my glass candle holders off of the fire mantle and there were shards everywhere underneath him, on the floor, on the SHAG carpet. SHAG, my friends. I went over the carpet with the vacuum a gazillion times and my paranoid mind STILL keeps imagining that there might be shards still hiding deep inside the carpet. I think I will vacuum again tonight… just to be safe….
• I put him in his highchair so that I could clean up the glass. By this time, Alfred is home from work. He goes to the kitchen to check on the kids and Jacob has rice stuck all over himself – his hair, his face, his shirt, his pants. So Alfred strips him down to his diapers and lets him finish his food.

By the time I was finally done cleaning, everyone else was done with dinner. I sat down to eat my cold dinner and gave Alfred a replay of our night and I could see that he was trying desperately hard not to laugh. The corners of his mouth kept twitching but, being the smart man that he is, he kept his face solemn and his words sympathetic. He knew that I was already pushed to edge by this time. Laughing was DEFINITELY not going to help. All I know is, Jacob is sooooooooooooooooo different from his sisters.