The Dream Versus The Reality

One of the reasons I looked forward to having kids was how we would create holiday traditions together, and the holidays would take on a new meaning. Thanksgiving and Christmas have not been that big of a deal for me in adult life. There were times when they were pretty painful, but mostly they were okay but just...non-events. If I wanted to see family, I had to travel. If I wasn't up to traveling, then I'd have to spend the holiday alone, which I did sometimes, and it was fine. I remember my first Christmas here I spent the day by myself touching up the paint in one of the upstairs bedrooms and eating Lucky Charms. It didn't bother me, but it's also not exactly your typical Norman Rockwell portrait.

I imagined that once we had kids, then we would have an excuse to stay home and create our own traditions, make our own big dinner, have our own exciting Christmas, and so forth. Having 4 people in the house instead of 1 or 2 makes it seem like a holiday is an "event" in the way that it's not when I'm sitting in my pajamas watching old episodes of Sex and the City on Netflix. I've been saying all month how excited I am about Christmas, how we're going to get a tree, and decorate everything, and the kids will know enough to be excited about stuff being different and novel (but still too young to understand about Christmas), and we'll make the same cookies my mom made each year, and it'll be great great great!

I felt the same way about Thanksgiving. We begged out of going to anybody else's house and instead planned our own nice meal, because I couldn't think of anything more awesome and cozy, just hanging out with the kids and Jake, cooking all day, listening to music, and enjoying being together. Jake is so fun and relaxing to be around that hanging out at home with him is automatically sort of festive. So that was my image of our Thanksgiving holiday.

In reality, just as I was heading out the door for a run, Milo tried to climb the back of our barstool and fell backwards, the stool crashing on top of him, gashing the back of his head open on the claw foot of our dining room table. So instead of spending the morning running in the cool 40 degree weather, I spent it in the overheated emergency room with one freaked out little boy. Who, to his credit, did amazingly well as the minutes stretched into hours and we skipped both his snack time and his lunch time. Despite that, Milo handled everything just beautifully, charming all of the nurses and doctors, even charming the guy cleaning the hallway floor, who chased after us to let me know how cute Milo was. He had a CT scan and two staples to the back of his head, and was declared good to go. It was a very rough day for him.

Then in the afternoon as I attempted to cook a giant dinner while two toddlers got increasingly cranky and clingy, I thought, why did I think I could do this? Why didn't we just go over to our friends' house, where M & N could play with their buddy Rueben, and I could have brought a few side dishes and called it a day? Instead I wanted to do this sweet family thing, but I forgot that anything with 2-year olds is not really sweet, it's hectic and annoying mostly, especially when they're fighting over the same toy and both decide to start screaming at once just as my gravy starts to boil.

And here I've been saying how much I'm looking forward to a family Christmas, but now I realize, it probably won't match my storybook image, at least not for another year or two until they exit the frenetic toddler stage.

At dinner Milo gamely tried the turkey, the green beans, the rolls, the squash, and the cranberry sauce. He wouldn't touch the mashed potatoes or the stuffing or the pie. Milo actually ate a substantial amount of cranberry sauce and roll, so that was a semi success. Nora would only taste the gravy, and refused to touch or consider anything else.

I keep vastly underestimating how insanely hard it is to deal with two toddlers. That said, despite everything, it was a great Thanksgiving. And, despite everything, I am still looking forward to our cozy family Christmas.

I just hope we stay out of the ER.