First of all, thank you to everyone who reached out to me re: Gwen’s speech delay. y’all are the best. I was able to speak to the woman in charge of the speech pathology department at the health center and get everything sort of sorted out? Part of the reason it was so hard to get any info is because I couldn’t remember the name of the speech pathologist we’d been assigned to (I was given the info when I was at the playground so I had nowhere to write it down) but as it turns out, she doesn’t work there anymore! They’ve hired a new SP who will be taking over all the old SP’s cases, but she’s not starting until December 9th, at which point the assessment appointment will be scheduled. Gwen is 10th on her list for assessment so it’ll probably be another 6 weeks until we have our appointment, but at least now I know..
YOU LEFT ME ALL ALONE (for 30 minutes with two other dogs for company).
HOW COULD YOU??? ps it turns out dogs are as obsessed with us as we are with them. Maybe even more! Science!
This morning Gwen really wanted to take her sleep sheep out of her crib but it’s a pain to get the velcros done up around the bars so instead I got out the mini travel-sized sleep sheep for her to carry around. I didn’t think it had batteries in it still but it did, and Gwen put on the whale sounds. That was the one we used to put on when she was a tiny baby, we used to call it space whales for some reason? The combination of the space whale sounds + the Christmas smells and sights are giving me massive two-years-ago flashbacks.
Christmas smells: I added cranberries and cloves to my stovetop potpourri and it is like FULL HOLIDAY FRAGRANCE in here. Taylor says it smells like clove cigarettes but that’s also a good smell so idk what he’s complaining about.
Christmas sights: We put up the Christmas tree on Friday night. I KNOW I KNOW IT’S SO EARLY but it was a valid choice because a) I’m Canadian so our Thanksgiving was like a month and a half ago and b) we got a new tree that is prelit and we needed to test it to make sure the lights work and everything! We haven’t actually put the decorations on it yet though, I’m not a total philistine. I like to leave it up for a week or so with no decorations so any babies or toddlers who are around have time to get used to it, a technique I’ve honed over years of childcare and one that never failed me until last year, when Gwen revealed herself as an avid tree-undecorator. Hopefully this year she’ll be better?
The prelit tree is the best and tbh idk why I never considered getting one before? It’s also self-shaping so instead of spending 50 hours fluffing out the branches and wrapping multiple light strands around it we just… put it up. I started up my holiday playlist while we were doing it and even though we moved it around the house a bunch to find the best spot we only made it through three songs, haha. We got this one, on sale from Canadian Tire. I hadn’t considered it initially (during my online pre-shopping) because I had my heart set on incandescent bulbs. I’ve had LED lights before that claimed to be “warm white” and were anything but, plus I’d read reviews of other prelit LED trees where the three sections all had different shades of white. However once Taylor and I checked the trees out in-store, this one was by far our favourite, both for the colour of the lights and also the branches- they are full, fairly realistic looking, with none of those long skinny-needle branches that we hated so much on my old tree, and a muted almost sage-y green shade that is really appealing.
I’m not really in full Christmas mode yet as I haven’t put my holiday playlist on since we put the tree up and I declined Taylor’s offer to buy mince pies this morning, but on Saturday I did pester Taylor and Sym into coming out with me & Gwen to Chapters to do a little gift shopping. I wanted to get a nice book of fairytales for Gwen, but there were two tales in particular I really wanted to have (as she has/is getting toys of these stories) and none of the books I liked the design/illustrations of had both (actually the one I REALLY liked the design of had no illustrations at all). In the end we bought her a bunch of individual one-story books, and then in my own typically ridic fashion I bought a bunch of Christmas stuff: a strand of battery-operated snowflake LED lights (similar to these but mine aren’t blue), two rolls of hipster giftwrap and a black bear ornament that Sym picked out.
Stay tuned tomorrow for a how-to on the wooden stand pictured here.
I’m Christmas-obsessed, no shame. I just bought my third tree at Michael’s today! Eventually I’ll have one in every room. If my husband was like I am our house would be on the news, haha.