A Little More About Monkey's First Christmas

Not all of Alastair's first Christmas was perfect.

Christmas Eve, we went to church. The choir had prepared a cantata, and I had agreed to take my grandmother with us. Amanda left home before me so that she could join the choir for one final rehearsal, and I took a slow, meandering path to my grandmother's house with Alastair. We picked her up and got to church on time, but Little Man wasn't happy at all. From the moment my grandmother got in the car and started talking, he started wailing.

He was good at church, sat mostly quietly and played with his toys. Afterward, Amanda took Alastair home and I took my grandmother home. Now, the plan was that I would drop off my grandmother and get home quickly. Plans were shattered when my grandmother ignored my efforts to get out of her house, and I got home just as Amanda was putting the boy to bed.

About an hour later, Amanda realized she'd forgotten to turn on his space heater. For some mysterious reason, even though his room is better insulated than any other in the house, his room gets very cold at night. Thus, we use a little space heater to keep the temp around 70.

I decided to sneak into his room and turn it on around 11:30. I forgot about the Kitty-Factor, though. Lucy snuck in with me and started crying at me. I managed to get to the heater and turn it on, and was half-way out of the room when I heard him stand up behind me and start babbling at me.

I froze. I stayed still for almost 10 minutes, hoping he would lie back down, hoping maybe he thought he was dreaming. No such luck. When I finally left the room at 11:40, he started wailing. He would scream and cry for a few minutes, get quiet, and start up again.

Now, we'd been through this once before for the same reason, and he cried for about 10 minutes and then went right back to sleep. This time, he kept it up for over an hour. We couldn't go to sleep because he couldn't go to sleep. We were afraid to go get him up because we thought he might start right back up again after we put him down.

Finally, at almost 1am, I relented. I got him up, found his diaper quite full, changed him, read him a book, and put him back down. He cried for all of about 10 seconds and was out like a light.

It was horrible, with both Amanda and me under the weather, but it did allow him to sleep a little longer on Christmas morning. And that means more sleep for mommy and daddy, and that's always a good thing.

Merry Ho Ho!

It's been an exciting Christmas. Alastair got lots of great goodies today, including a dinosaur for his roll-a-round balls, Noah's Ark, a zebra rocking horse, and plenty of other little toys and doo-dads.

The fun continues for him tomorrow as we exchange gifts with my mom and grandmother, and then again on Wednesday with dad & Randy in the afternoon, and Susan and Shana, old college friends, in the evening.

The day was rounded out with a trip to the movies (our first time together in many months) to see Casino Royale. What an awesome flick! Great deviation from the Bond films of yesteryear, while keeping a nod to the kitsch. Great parkour scene to start the movie, too! Wasn't expecting that!

Anyway, have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your heart be gay, and cuddle up with someone you love.

Clutch Repair, Round 2

The new clutch pipe arrived early last week, but right after it got cold, so I wasn't in a big hurry to climb under the car and freeze my butt off to install it. I waited a few days, built the necessary pieces on the work bench, and decided to take a stab at it on Saturday.

Saturday came, and with it, a bunch of conference calls. I was on the phone from about 10am until 11pm, off and on. That didn't leave a lot of room for me to get Mr. K. to come and help, so I took one of my brief lulls in the call to mount all the pieces, and then got Amanda to come press the clutch about 50 times to bleed the system.

All is now well with the Miata's clutch, and I get to bill for the time I spent fixing it! I even got to bill for driving the car Saturday night, when I had to come to work just to press a power button.