Christmas

During residency I get five straight days off around the holidays. Luckily, my five days started on Christmas Eve. We are going to start spending Christmas together as a family at home, so Doni, Ava, and I had Christmas Eve and Day all to ourselves. 

On Christmas Eve we decided to do something that Doni and I hadn't done in a long time and something that Ava hasn't ever done... We went to the movies. We decided on The Tale of Despereaux because Doni had read the book and we thought Ava would like it. We went all in for the experience getting popcorn, pop, and candy. If it's your child's first trip to the movis, you've gotta do it right. We entered the theater as the previews were showing. Ava couldn't take her eyes off the massive screen. I had to help her up the stairs because she wasn't watching where she was going. 

We picked out some seats near the bottom and sat Ava between us. We sat the bag of popcorn between her legs and she reached in the bag as often, if not more, than Doni and I did. After sampling the pop and Sour Patch Kids, she must have thought she was in heaven! She sat mesmerized for the first half hour of the movie, still transfixed by the size of the screen. After a while she resumed blinking and shifted around in her seat through the rest of the movie, but she quietly watched the whole thing. 

The following day she came down the stairs to see her new kitchen set up in our living room. She loves it. She opened her presents sporatically. She'd open one, play with it for a while, play with her kitchen for a while, and then realize there were more presents under the tree. The cycle repeated throughout the morning. Eventually she got through them all. It was a fun Christmas because this was the first time she had an inkling of understanding about what was going on. 

The next day we started making the rounds to see our families. We left early in the morning for Michigan, only to run into freezing rain on the way. A three and a half hour trip turned into a seven and a half hour trip, two and a half hours of which were spent parked on the highway in traffic jams. Luckily we remembered to bring Ava's portable DVD player. She worked her way through Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2, and another movie in that one trip. She was a trooper.

The rest of our travels were relatively uneventful. If was good to see everyone we got a chance to visit and stay with. My five days off ended too soon, but duty calls. Doni still had another week off. Her focus was going to be potty training. More to come...