Month-by-month: December

School party

December 9 was the babyschool party, and Annika's class did something different; instead of having all the kids sing a song like the other classes did, they performed a little skit. One girl was the Gingerbread Girl, who escaped from two other kids in a play kitchen and then kept encountering the other kids in twos and threes; they'd ask "Where are you going this bright and sunny day?" and she'd answer that she escaped from the little old woman and little old man, and [all the previous groups of kids, e.g. bunnies, kittens, doggies, etc.]. Annika and the other Finnish-descent girl, Ida, were "forest fairies" with green hats, about halfway through the thing. At the end, the gingerbread girl got eaten by the fox, who told her to come a little closer. Heh. It was hilarious and so cute, especially when there were spontaneous onstage hugs. Afterward there were the usual treats and a visit from Santa Claus (whom she would only stand next to, as always). Lukas came with us, of course, and spent pretty much the whole time asleep in his carseat bucket, getting made a fuss over by all the other parents, kids and teachers.

Christmas, with Grandma & Grandpa

Since we decided not to risk the germ soup of holiday-season air travel with a month-old baby, we stayed in our new house over Christmas and hosted Grandma and Grandpa. Mostly it was a festival of Annika bossing them around in various games, often with Grandma holding Lukas at the same time. Plus of course there was a big Christmas dinner, mountains of presents, the cousins coming over, all the good stuff. Annika got a bicycle with training wheels, since she's now too big for the trike (or so she says). And this year, she was finally really old enough to help decorate the tree! That was so much fun -- we all four went to pick one from the lot (Lukas asleep in the portable carseat the whole time), and Annika helped Daddy with the lights, then the three of us put all the ornaments on. The new ones this year were a craft she and I did together: Shrinky-Dink Gabba Gang! (I bought some blank sheets of Shrinky-Dink plastic, traced the characters from a coloring book, and wrote Christmas 2011 on them, and Annika and I colored them with pencils. They turned out really cool!) In general, Lukas mostly did a lot of sleeping and eating and getting his picture taken while Annika bounced off the walls, high on sugary treats and grandparental attention. A great first Christmas for us as a family of four!

One-month checkup

Lukas had his one-month checkup in December, and it went extremely well -- the doc made note of the fact that he's in the 50th percentile in weight but the 65th percentile in height, as if the two numbers should be closer, but I was like, "Yeah, do you see his dad standing here? You see what he looks like? This is what I expected, lady!"

Annika's interests these days

--Superheroes and princesses: The girl is obsessed with Spider-Man (I went to ridiculous lengths to get her a Spidey costume for Christmas in just under a week ... EXTORTIONATE SHIPPING!) and the concept of superheroes in general. She wants to know who's a good guy, who's a bad guy, what powers they have, etc. We need to brush up on our knowledge of the canon, obviously, but we are happy to encourage this interest; the thorniest issue so far has been explaining that A)Spider-Man, et. al., are not REAL real, and B)that Peter Parker is Spider-Man ... At the same time, she's very into princesses, fairies and the like. In her mind, princesses seem to be basically superheroes who wear pretty dresses -- which is why I'm OK with it (as opposed to what I think a princess is: somebody who has no real power and was born into her position, to be made much of while simultaneously being shunted aside to let princes and kings do all the fun stuff). (Overthink, much?)

--Telling Lukas about her day: She'd come home from babyschool and sit there for awhile, telling him what she did in school and asking what he did. It cracked her up if one of us would answer for him in a high, Mr. Bill-type voice, "Ohhh, you know, slept a lot, ate a lot, got a few new diapers ..."

--Asking how you make things: From towels to cars to pasta, she's very curious these days to know how things are made. It's a constant challenge to try to explain simply enough, yet in enough realistic detail to satisfy, but it's actually pretty fun, and shows you where your own limits of understanding of mechanical things, physics, materials and processes are!