And here we are in the middle of December staring down Christmas and the New Year with our darling Natalie.

We celebrated our first Holidays of note with Natalie starting with Halloween and followed by Thanksgiving. Neither were large affairs due to Natalie being pretty young, and the ever increasing Covid threat in the background.

Halloween highlighted the difficulties of adding events to the schedule and doing those things in a timely manner. Pumpkins were picked up from Costco a week or two before the day, but actually carving them was pushed off time and time again until the last minute. A flurry of gutting and carving got the pumpkins out just before the trick or treaters started making their rounds, and the decorations were similarly last minute. A “Baby Yoda” pumpkin was selected for the first pumpkin to honor the start of the second season of the Mandalorian, and traditional Jack’o lantern was selected for the second. There were some regrets about the intricate baby Yoda pattern as soon as the carving started, but we soldiered on and it turned out pretty good.

Natalie did Halloween as a pink bunny in an Amazon costume of questionable quality that shed a lot of pink fuzz. We don’t think she ate enough of the fuzz to cause any problems, but we will see how she turns out. She could only handle 15 minutes of the costume before starting to overheat. I suppose that if we were taking her out in the cold, it wouldn’t be such a bad costume, but for hanging around inside, it was a bit much. No trick or treating for Natalie, we got our photos with her, and then it was pretty much off to bed. The bowl of candy with pre-bagged candy went out on the porch, and we had an easy night.

Thanksgiving was similar, Natalie didn’t care about the food, and carried on with her routine while we assembled a feast of sorts. Rolls, turkey breast, sweet potatoe casserole, mashed potatos, honey baked carrots, green beans and gravy were on the menu. As seems to be common lately, the turkey was done way to early and the rest of the cooking schedule was out of whack, but it all worked out in the end.

After the feast, we had the rest of the long weekend to ourselves. We got the Christmas spirit flowing with our annual tree from Yetter’s Tree farm, lights on the house and decorations around the house. We had tried to plan a photo session for the weekend as well, but due to Covid that was cancelled, so we did our own. Lets just say its a lot of work, and Natalie does not have the stamina to commit to more than a few minutes at a time. She also doesn’t really enjoy being jammed in a festive steel bin, but sometimes baby’s have to do what they have to do.

In the background of last two months was Michigan football. Thankfully that has mostly ended, because it was a disaster of a season. It looked okay starting out, but quickly resulted in bad loss after bad loss. Poor Natalie did not have a good start to her Michigan fandom, but maybe she’ll live to see an improvement.

On the Natalie front she is happy and healthy. She usually sleeps 7-8 hours at night before waking up at 3-4 am for some food and then back to sleep. The days can be harder as she often doesn’t like to nap for more than 30-40 minutes unless she is in the car, or snuggled with Marissa. When she’s up, she likes to play and babble and hangout with Mom and Dad. She also loves to stand up with the help of Mom or Dad.