·:[ Peanut Butter Mom ]:·
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It seems like the holidays were a whole lot more fun when someone else was in charge of making the magic. Presents, cookies, parties, cards - ugh, I’m exhausted!

Nana spent her holiday with the other grandkids in the Northwest, and Jelly Dad and I headed to California for his parent’s anniversary celebration and Christmas. I made 5 batches of cookies/candy and 2+ trays of finger sandwiches, in addition to doing lots of dishes and cooking lots of appetizers. I don’t cook or do dishes that much at home in a week! (thanks to Nana, my meal prep place, and Jelly Dad, of course)

It was good to be with family for the holiday, but traveling with 2 children under the age of 5 plus way too many presents was a burden. Plus, even though I still had to do a lot of the footwork to make the magic happen, it was like being a guest at someone else’s Christmas.

Princess and Trouble had a great time, though, and I think that is most important. Then again, I sure could use a spa day about now.

If the constant presence of snow for the last 7 weeks wasn’t enough to beat it into my head that it’s winter, now we’ve hit the “season of the sick”. Princess has a runny nose (not that that’s going away until summer, and even then it’s still unlikely to be completely gone), and Nana has the crud which she is certain to have gotten from Trouble who still seems to have it, and who spent 3 days at home with Nana the week before last with a fever and another day at home this last week with a different malady.

A gross malady - a barfy malady. In the car on the way to daycare, on the floor after dinner, and all over himself, me and his bed at 4:00 in the morning on Thursday night. Is it any wonder I need coffee to get through my workday?

Of course, Trouble becomes “Velcro Baby” whenever he’s sick. Don’t even think of trying to set him down. He’d much prefer to sleep on your shoulder, but if you do manage to get him to sleep in his bed, you’ll be hard-pressed to manage to sneak out of his bed without him waking up.

He’s really a basically healthy guy. Despite the 3 days we spent over his 1st birthday in Children’s Hospital with a Strep/Mono infection, Trouble is blessed not to have any major health issues. That said, he is still proving to be “the sickly one” in our family. The aforementioned hospital stay, the recurrence of the Strep/Mono a couple weeks later, several ear infections, the viral infection from a couple weeks ago and other assorted colds have earned him this bad reputation.

These are the weeks I’m glad to be in our multi-generational home. Thank goodness for Nana and her care of Trouble over the last couple weeks (not to mention the first 10 months of his life!). I only get 5 sick days a year, and it’s only February - way too early to have burned up 4 of them. And I’m thankful for my dish-washing, Candyland playing Jelly Dad of a hubby who picks up the rest of the slack during these long winter weeks and almost never gets sick himself.