We weren't the Griswolds after all...

Lawdy, what a busy Christmas break!  I haven't blogged in a while, so if you want the family update before school goes back, here it is!

We packed the four of us into my 4-door sedan to drive home to the Midwest for Christmas on December 20th.  1200 miles to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to see my parents and Hubster's family, then another 300 miles to Wisconsin to see the rest of my extended family and introduce everyone to baby Spartacus.  Then the 300 miles BACK to Fort Wayne and 1200 miles BACK to our humble abode.  The drive up went better than we could have planned; I was envisioning the Griswolds and instead got a relatively quiet baby and a very relaxed doggie (without the drugs we had brought - we were pleasantly surprised).

Annabelle with her cousins,
Thayer and Bailey

We enjoyed Christmas cookies, played peekaboo with Aunt K and Grammy, and had a very busy Christmas eve, going from my mother-in-law's house for dinner, to the children's service at their church, to Hubster's cousin's house for desert, to my dad's church for the 11 PM candlelight service...and Spartacus was a trooper through it all. In fact, he was a gem until we took Annabelle to the kennel while we spent the weekend in Wisconsin; Spartacus' sleep schedule, which wasn't really affected even by late-night church services, got wiggy about the same time he stopped having his dog in the room with him. I hadn't stopped to think about it, but recently Annabelle has been sleeping in Spartacus' room - even though she has a perfectly good couch to sleep on.  She was fun to watch at my in-laws, who have two big golden retrievers who were rather interested in the wee baby Spartacus. I wouldn't say Annabelle was...aggressive...but she made it very clear to Thayer and Bailey that this was her baby.

Spartacus watching the Packers with his maternal
great-grandfather, his namesake

We spent Christmas day opening gifts with my parents and brother (we literally took all day...we never changed out of our jammies), and then spent the weekend staying with my grandparents in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, and went to my grandfather's small-town church on Sunday and watched the Packers beat Detroit in the last regular game of the season.  We had some bad timing on Spartacus' part; I brought all three Packer onesies he owns, and during that Sunday he managed to have a major blowout on all three.  Now this was mostly our faults; since we started him on solids at home we've been very lazy about it - it's more for fun than nutrition as he's still breastfeeding full time.  He had only tried acorn squash at home, and that one ant that fell into his stroller over Thanksgiving, but till then his palate had been limited.  In Indiana he got sweet potatoes and bananas and that threw off his little tummy...we were glad we won the game, since three poopy Packer onesies seemed like an awfully bad omen.


We returned to Fort Wayne for dinner with my in-laws, and then began the journey home.  Even excluding family members we weren't able to see this visit (flu and scheduling issues), Spartacus met no fewer than fifteen new relatives on my husband's side and twenty on my side - woo!  I can't believe he behaved as well as he did while getting passed around so much.  We got several multi-generational photos:

Spartacus with my mother-in-law's parents, his great-grandparents

Spartacus with his daddy, his daddy's daddy,
and his daddy's daddy's momma

All crammed in!

After this wonderful visit, we packed everyone and (almost) everything back up to the car to drive home.  The day before we left Fort Wayne, Spartacus' cough came back (we took him in right before we drove up and he was on steroids and antibiotics all vacation), and it got progressively worse the longer we were in the car.  After putting about 3,100 miles on my Mercedes, we were 100 miles from home and my car started making awful squeaky belt sounds and a nasty crunching sound when it turned.  I was checking my email after we got unpacked and had an email from our landlords telling us they had decided to list our home...in March, three months before we were planning to move.  We knew they were thinking of trying to sell it instead of re-renting it, but we weren't tracking that this could happen while we were still living there, which means all sorts of potential complications for our little family.  Sick car, sick baby, tenuous house situation...bang-up way to end 2014, but now it's a new year!  Spartacus has reached new stages in the past few weeks - grabbing, crying when something is taken away, missing momma as soon as I leave the room - and it will be fun to see all the more positive new changes in the next year, like crawling, walking, and first words.  Grad school, new job, another move - it will be interesting! Thank you for keeping up with our adventures, and I promise Helarious Lizzy will continue to follow our new paths in 2015.