After the week we had, we felt we deserved to take a little trip down to Half Moon Bay and get our tree. It’s one of our favorite things to do each year and this time we got to share it with someone who likes to touch EVERYTHING. Walker was very helpful in picking out the perfect tree for his first Christmas. There were many he inspected but this long, thin tree passed the test. We do have a small Charlie Brown tree with a single red ornament which won’t grow into a big tree while we wax poetic about the meaning of Christmas but we love it just the same. Walker helped quite a lot with decorating as well. He went through his Gigi’s ornaments and picked a few he liked, added a few of Mommy’s and Daddy’s and he even got two of his very own — a nice blue gingerbread man his Mommy made and a big red clay hand print he made just a month ago. With the star atop the tree, he thinks it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

Today was the Holiday pageant at Sofyia’s. Walker slept through the first half and watched the bigger kids for the second half. He did get to go out and see Santa who brought a gift all for him! He was very excited but he is restraining himself and decided to put the package under the tree. He did do some dancing and expressed his anticipation for next year’s pageant when he will be big enough to hold hands and dance in a circle during the dreidel song.

Did I mention it was a tough week? I had to go down to San Jose all week for work and each day included some sort of mandatory night activity. Larry was perfect Daddy and took care of Walker. It was nice that the first day he told me, “It’s really tough being Mommy.” Anyway, I was at a conference in the convention center and there were over 1500 attendees from Adobe’s sales and marketing staff. There are a number of women who recently had children and all of us were in the same spot — at least once during the day, we had to take care of “making baby’s lunch”. Well, a large convention center is just not conducive to this activity so we all got creative. Some folks went to hotel rooms, others went to the loo, and well, I found a new feature for the baby shuttle craft. Moms do need to be creative and I discovered that the new car is quite accommodating of electronic equipment (powered through the lighter), has adequate room for maneuvering said equipment and even has a nice drying rack between “meals.” The layout was almost better than home since I could hook up my iPod to the stereo and get surround sound for “making lunch” music. I was so busy one day that I had to take a conference call on top of everything else. Some day I’ll look back on this absurdity fondly but for now I simply know that we do what we must to balance it all.

It took all weekend to catch up on rest and of course, Walker didn’t cooperate on the sleep front. I think I’m going to downgrade him from “he’s the most perfect baby in the world who is just going through an anti-sleeping phase” to “he’s the most perfect baby in the world (with the minor exception of waking up every few hours).” It’s not a problem per se but I will be interested to see if things change at all when he starts solid foods THIS WEEKEND.

More to come… I suspect there will be some fun photos in my future. Better juice up that battery.