To be honest, I'm ambivalent about the Santa thing. The whole pretend thing makes me feel a little uncomfortable, even though there's this great excitement about it, too. Kate was somewhat excited about the whole thing.

The line was long and it was cold. While daddy held our place in line (we provided him with hot chocolate) Kate and I went for a ride in the choo choo train and we petted the reindeer. She was fascinated by the people dressed up as frosty and some kind of polar bear. Unfortunately those costumes were filled with high school kids who didn't really interact with the little kids too much.

It really does. I have a few email accounts scattered around and some of them are on Yahoo.

Firefox is my browser of choice and it drives me nuts that it just shuts down everytime I view Yahoo mail. I don't blame Firefox, I blame Yahoo.

Kate and I spent quite a bit of time in the E.R. yesterday and she didn't even need stitches after all.

She went to say nite nite to her big brothers and tried climbing in or over the laundry basket (also known as "boat"). She fell and cut her lip on some of the hardware on Danny's door. It was a nasty cut, fairly deep and right below her lip. Luckily Ms. Stephanie (one of her daycare caregivers) was on the way home and came to our house to have a quick look. She thought it would be a good idea to have a doctor look at it.

We went to the Urgent Care center close to our house. It was a lovely place, no one else there, and the doctor made Kate a balloon face from a surgical glove (big hit). He thought it needed stitches but was afraid to do it because he thought the cut ran into her lip. If it was off by just a smidgen it'd disfigure her lip for the rest of her life. He called around, found an E.R. where there was a plastic surgeon on call and off we went.

We arrived at the E.R. in Maywood (a 45 minute drive) at around 10 pm. They finally had time for us after 1 am. Kate was desperately tired and unhappy and spent quite a bit of time crying in the waiting room. When the pediatrician came to see her she just had it and screamed. Stickers and crayons did clear up her mood after that, yay! The very nice pedi called in the plastics guy and he re-opened the cut to have a close look and said the lip was not involved after all and it would be best to let it heal by itself. They wanted to give us some Bacitracin (sp) but we have plenty of Neosporin (the same thing) at home. We all know how much hospitals charge for stuff like that!

We came home at about 2:30 am. I tried to nurse the little munchkin before bed, but she was a tad tired. She woke up at around 6:00 am. (WHY?) Luckily we dragged out more bed time by nursing. She's fine, but tired and cranky. She went to Daycare this morning, and I'm getting ready to work. I'm tired too, and trying not to get too cranky myself!

Alex and Dan are Kate's favorite guys in the world (after daddy of course). It's SO darn hard to get them to pose for photos.


Danny is 10. He's the moody one, lemme tell ya. He's a good kid, but has a bit of an emotional temper at times. He tells me about 1000 times a weekend how much he loves Katie. She's so lucky! The way she pronounces Dannnnnny is so cute. The nns are very pronounced. His bed is great for jumping, that's why she likes to go in his room.

Alex is 12. Scary, very scary. He's practically a teenager and one cool dude. I like this pic because his pose / expression matches the background. (The background is the concrete in our basement.) Alex is very funny and a major goof ball. This picture is not representative of his usual expression! He is the master of getting Kate to play along in his make belief games. She likes to hang out in his room, because there are cars and he builds a mean fort!