On Christmas Eve we went to the Children’s Mass, much to the delight of my husband who has never quite bought into the magic of Midnight Mass. Aside from my wedding, that had to be the most entertaining Mass I’ve ever attended. Both my husband and my son behaved unusually well, and even sang along with the carols (although they didn’t really know the lyrics, and my son didn’t really understand that he was supposed to stop singing when the music ended). But that was the highlight of Christmas Eve. The rest was a bit noisy. While we found it really cute that Aidan got his top two front teeth for Christmas, the screaming and crying and wrenching that came with the debut of those little chompers was less delightful for us all.
Then came Christmas Day. Back in November, whilst in some sort of state of delusion, we bought a turkey and the full spread with high hopes of having a high class gourmet Thanksgiving dinner, but chickened out and made grilled cheese and tomato soup instead. So for Christmas dinner, we had the good sense to accept an invitation to have dinner at our neighbor’s house. Dinner went beautifully right up until those prunes I gave Aidan to release his Yuletide constipation kicked in. The aroma of honeybaked ham and pumpkin pie wafting through the air was no match for the product of that jar of prunes. I suspect we will not be invited back next year. The good news is, the clean up process was so foul I think it made our neighbor’s two year old daughter rethink her resistance to potty training, and Aidan was all smiles for the rest of the day.
So things did not exactly go off without a hitch, and certainly not as I had envisioned. The mega-planner-control-freak in me wanted to crawl out of that cave I’ve been forcing her to live in since Aidan was born and scream. But the mommy in me wouldn’t change a thing. All things considered, our first holiday season with our wonderful baby boy was pretty much perfect.
