MichaelandChrissy.com

We did send out a Christmas letter this year, but I wanted to post it to the web site anyway.  Who knows, maybe somebody who isn’t on our holiday mailing list would like to know what we were up to this year?  If you’re not on our Christmas card list, and would like to be, please let me know!  The “online version” is now enhanced with links back to blog posts that give more details.  Click “Continue Reading” to read the 2008 Christmas Letter.

I love to watch anime while feeding Gavin at night.  It’s the perfect time for a guilty pleasure.  With an exhausted Chrissy asleep by 8 PM, it was usually just me and Gavin up at ten, midnight, and later for feedings.  He would need a bottle roughly every two or three hours.  What else can you do while feeding the baby but watch TV?  I had a lot of anime coming through my Netflix queue, and I would intermittently watch an hour or two a night while taking care of Gavin.

Netflix has a really good selection of anime.  I watched the entire multi-disc series of Black Lagoon (12 eps), RoD The TV (26 eps), Hellsing (13 eps), Haibane-Renmei (13 eps), and Noir (26 eps) during Gavin’s first few months.  I sometimes watched whole movies, including Vexille, Blue Gender, and MD Geist.  There’s also some good anime on cable nowadays.  I’ve been watching weekly episodes of Hellgirl, Gunslinger Girl and Gundam 00 on my DVR lately.  I really enjoy anime, but I don’t think I’ll get to watch as much anymore.

The problem is that Gavin is almost sleeping through the night.  Now that the night-time feedings are dwindling, I have a lot less time for anime.  Once I went back to work after paternal leave, Chrissy took over weekday nightly feedings.  That left me with nights between 8 PM and midnight, and weekends.  Viewings were further curtailed as Gavin has required fewer bottles (and slept longer) in the last few weeks, but it’ll be a lot harder to find downtime for cartoons soon.  I suppose that I could just wake up at 2 AM to watch anime (without the feeding part), but I really like sleep too…

Chrissy likes to have professional pictures taken of the boys every three months or so.  We’ve been to a lot of places for photos, but I think that we have settled on the studio in our local Wal-Mart.   The photographers there always manage to make Aiden smile and they’re very accommodating with our requests.  Also, they are willing to sell us all the images on a CD with copyright permissions.

Chrissy had a number of poses in mind for this year (and a change of clothes for both of the boys), so we hit each one in turn.  Our photographer was very helpful, and took care of everything that Chrissy wanted.  We went with a split theme of Christmas and “Indiana University” (we seem to collect IU-branded clothes) this time.  The pictures turned out fantastic, and many of them will go out with this year’s Christmas cards.

We took the boys to the George Carden Circus at the Hammond Civic Center on the weekend after Thanksgiving.  It was a pretty good show for such a small venue (it was literally the size of a high school basketball gymnasium).  Aiden had never been to a circus before, and he was captivated.  I forgot how much circuses smell like, um, animals.  There were lots of animals there.

Aiden and I got to ride an elephant before the show started.  There was a number of good circus acts.  We saw a lion tamer, and he had a white tiger in his pride.  The clown was pretty good.  The highlight for me was the motorcycles speeding in the steel sphere.  I’ve never seen that up close before.  Then again, I’m used to circuses of the Soleil variety.

The boys were very well behaved: Aiden switched often between my lap, Chrissy’s lap, and the bleachers; Gavin cried a bit, but we couldn’t hear him over the various acts, he mostly just took the bottle and looked around.  We had a pretty good time, but it leads me to wonder how much better the (much more expensive) Ringling Brothers Circus would be.

Chrissy recently found some time to take some Halloween photos of Aiden and Gavin.  Yes, Halloween was two weeks ago, but it’s hard to find time for these things when you’ve got two kids!  She could have easily blown it off, but Halloween photos are an important family tradition in our house.  We’ve got fabric backdrops and props and everything!

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

An unintended part of this tradition has been the choice of clothing.  Gavin gets all of Aiden’s baby clothes, which have been in storage for two years, including the Halloween-themed clothes.  So what we end up with is a photo of Gavin in the same clothes and almost the same pose as the one that was taken of Aiden two Halloweens ago.

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

This brings us an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast our two boys.  When they were only a few months old, they looked pretty much the same.  Gavin has more hair, and Aiden was almost a month younger at his first Halloween, but they still look remarkably alike.  Unfortunately, Gavin didn’t get as many outfits or backdrops as Aiden did, but remember, Chrissy has two kids to manage now!

Aiden (2006)

Aiden (2008)

But then there are also the differences between then and now!  Although Aiden still has the ceramic pumpkin that sports his name across the front, that is where the similarities end!  He’s gotten to be such a big boy over the last two years.  We’ll have to see what memories next Halloween brings us!

Last night, Chrissy decided that Gavin should try something a little more solid than formula.  So, she mixed up some baby cereal for him to try.  It wasn’t much more than a thin gruel.  He didn’t take to it very well, and pushed most of it out of his mouth with his tongue.  Maybe he’ll be more receptive next time?

I remember when Chrissy first gave Aiden solid food.  He didn’t seem to like it at all then, and he didn’t like it this time, either.  Chrissy gave him a bite of the baby cereal, since he was asking for some.  His expression was funny, at first, until he started dry heaving.  No wonder Gavin didn’t want any!

Gavin slept through the night for the first time last night.  It was a shock because Aiden began to sleep through the night at fifteen weeks old, so Chrissy and I were crossing our fingers that Gavin would do the same.  At fourteen weeks, Gavin was still waking up at 2 AM and 5 AM every night, so we weren’t holding out much hope for a big change in a single week.  But we got lucky!

Or so we thought…  When daylight savings time kicked in on Saturday night, all of our clocks automatically fell back one hour.  So Gavin woke up at four?  Well, no.  Our bedroom clock went completely wonky and reset itself four hours ahead.  Chrissy woke me up for work at 2 AM, thinking that it was in fact 6 AM.  We were so happy to see that both kids were still asleep!

Chrissy didn’t realize the error until we turned on the TV for the weather forecast, and it said that it was 3 AM!  I was just about to drive to work, assuming that it was still dark outside because of the time change, but instead went back to bed.  When we crawled out of bed for the real 6 AM, Gavin was just waking up (and hungry!).  We’ll have to see if this was just a fluke!

Halloween is a pretty big deal in our house, and this year marks Aiden’s first real “Trick or Treat” experience.  I was really looking forward to it.  When I first heard that Barack Obama was holding a political rally at nearby Wicker Park on the same night, I wondered why he would overlap with a holiday.  The rally even started right in the middle of Treating hours!  To paraphrase from the great works of Dr. Seuss:

Clearly Obama hates Halloween!  The whole Halloween season!  Now, please don’t ask why.  No one quite knows the reason.  It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.  It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.  But I think that the most likely reason of all, may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

I understand that there is less than a week before the election, but at least give more than two days notice for such a huge rally.  My first reaction was to take the whole family to see it, but not during my favorite holiday.  Wicker Park seemed more than happy to pre-empt their own Halloween concert schedule, however, and many others ditched Halloween to go see Obama.  Our usual huge crowds of costumed revelers were severely stunted.

Some people stuck around for Halloween though.  We had about a dozen small groups stop by.  Just before Trick or Treating started (only from 5-7 PM in our town), we took the boys around the block to Grandma’s house for photos.  On the way back, Aiden got to try out Trick or Treating for the first time (in his adorable lion costume).  Then we hung back on the neighbor’s new front deck to pass out candy.  Due to the sparse turnout, we packed up early.  We still had fun though, and I’m looking forward to a better night next year!

Scheeringa Farms is a fresh produce vendor not far from where we live.  It’s a nice, family-owned place close to Cline Avenue and 45th in Highland, IN.  They have a petting zoo every year around Halloween, but we’ve never taken Aiden there before.  Chrissy’s Mom took Aiden last year, but Chrissy and I have never gone ourselves.  Well, today we took Aiden and Gavin.

Aiden enjoyed feeding the animals, but they were really hungry and sort of aggressive.  There was a vendor that sold animal food there, so we bought an ice cream cone full of seeds to feed the goats and llamas.  We didn’t get far with that cone!  One llama ate the entire cone right out of my hand!  I had Aiden in the other hand, so we both got mugged by that llama.  It was funny though.

We also fed carrots to some goats and donkeys.  Although the animals were hungry, they were very gentle, so no one was bitten while feeding them.  Aiden also got to pet the bunnies, his favorite animal.  He got to play the ubiquitous duck game as well.  Gavin slept the entire time in the Baby Bjorn, but he was under a blanket due to the chilly weather.  It was a nice little outing for a cold Saturday morning.

Gavin was baptised on Sunday, October 19th, 2008.  We now have two Catholic boys in the family!  Gavin was very good: he slept through most of his first mass, but woke up just before receiving his baptism.  It was a very nice ceremony.  Aiden was very good throughout the mass as well.  Our family members took lots of photos for us.

Afterwards, we had a family gathering at our house.  It was still early in the Fall, so we had the tents up in the backyard while the weather was nice.  Everyone had a good time.  We’re looking forward to spending more time with Gavin’s new godparents, Cassie and Nick.