making memories

One of the things I asked mom to plan for us to do while visiting was make and decorate gingerbread cookies. That's an integral part of my childhood Christmas, and one that I haven't been able to indulge in in years, since Joel is not a big fan of gingerbread cookies. The one time I tried making them in Amsterdam, I made only half a batch, and even so ended up eating them all myself.

Mom was clever and planned ahead in multiple ways -- she made a bunch of cookies in advance, in case we only had time for frosting and decorating, and also made dough in advance so that we could just roll them out and cut them; after all, when you're two, that's the fun part.

And fun it was:


Rolling out the dough.

She kept picking up pieces and putting them inside of the cookie cutter.

Cutting out a gingerbread baby.

Grandma then frosted them and Gwen decorated them with currants.

One satisfied chef.

One of her favorite books recently has been one that has the story of the gingerbread baby in it, so getting to make her own was awfully cool -- and this coolness was compounded when she realized that they were COOKIES, you could EAT them! It hardly gets better.

nap strike

The difference between 20 months and 24 months when dealing with a 7 hour time change has been quite a bit. When we came over in June/July, Gwen had two mornings where she was up around 4:30 (killer!), a few mornings when she was up around 6:00 (thank you, Grandma, for letting us sleep in!), and then she was basically fine, due to regular naps at regular times and regular bedtimes at night.

We haven't been so lucky. Gwen slept all the way over on the plane on Friday, which was great for Joel, but that plus the two hour drive to my parents' place meant that when she went to bed at 11:00pm that night, she woke up around 3:15 and was ready to go for the day. On Saturday, she did nap some on the ride to Madison (an hour before lunch), and a bit in the ride to Lake Delton (about half an hour mid afternoon), and that is, unfortunately, the last time she has napped -- unless you count when she woke up at 3:15 Sunday morning, and went back to bed for about two hours an hour later, or when she woke up at 2:30 yesterday morning and went back to bed three hours later for about two hours. Somehow we managed to power through yesterday until 6:15pm, which is honestly not all that unusual of a bed time, but still she was up around 4:30, and while she almost fell asleep in the car around 10:30am, we didn't let her because we were about 10 min. from home and really really really wanted to have her nap there.

Unfortunately, it's now 2.5 hours later and I'm fairly certain we've past the sweet spot, and I doubt we'll be able to get her to nap this afternoon.

Argh, argh, argh. What with the almost 12 hour time change for me, I'm feeling the jet lag like I almost never do, and I've been crashing around 7:00pm and going to bed then myself -- which means among other things when Gwen woke up at 4:30, I woke up too, and figured there was no point in presuming upon Mom to take care of her in the middle of the night yet again, so I got up. I'm now horribly tired, but unlikely to get a nap myself. The worst part of it is, I have no patience with Gwen, especially when she gets whiny and shows how much she really, really needs a nap. But I'm simply too tired to deal with her, even now when she's playing happily with a tea set that was mine when I was a kid, even when she's digging through the stack of library books from our visit yesterday saying "nother book, nother book". Ugh.

On the other hand, the fact that she's poured a bunch of marbles into the tea pot and is offering it to me, "mommy tea", and then running to Joel and offering it to him, "daddy coffee", is pretty cute.

ETA: It's nearly 12 hours since she's woken up, and I think she's finally fallen asleep. And it's still early enough in the afternoon that she could have a decent nap, and be ready for bed at a decent-ish time. Hurrah!