Xmas Redux.

It's been a bit of a whirlwind holiday weekend, with baking and presents and last-minute shopping. I braved the grocery store on the 23rd to get all the necessities for our dinner, and for the cheesecake I was making for dessert on Christmas Eve. This was the first cheesecake I'd ever made, and I was really worried about how it would turn out...especially after it seemed rather custard-y after I pulled it out of the oven.



But it turned out great! It was an orange chocolate swirl cheesecake, and it was really, really yummy. I even made the crust (although I will admit I bought the graham cracker crumbs...I can never crush 'em as small as they need to be).

Christmas Eve was dinner and presents over at Mom and Dad's house....Mom made and awesome meal of lasagna, Caesar salad and garlic bread. Ella got completely spoiled by all the presents from Grandma and Pop, MawMaw (Ella's great-grandma) and great-aunt Carolyn and great-uncle Norman. She wasn't so much into opening the presents, but liked playing with stuff once it was unwrapped.

Speaking of spoiled, Jon and I got a gorgeous new KitchenAid mixer! We were not expecting it at all, and we were thrilled to get it. We'd been wanting one for so long, and just kept putting it off.



We actually came home and used it that same night -- or Jon did, anyway -- to make the Irish potato casserole for dinner the next day. It's bad-ass, I have to say. And gorgeous.

Santa was very good to Ella -- she got books, puzzles, alphabet blocks, stuffed animals, and her most favorite present:



Her comfy chair! She loves her chair. We've had a couple of tipping-over incidents from overenthusiastic sitting, but nothing more than a head bonk.

Dinner on Christmas Day was rib roast, the aforementioned Irish potato casserole, and Tuscan-style peas (Mario Batali's recipe). All deeeeelicious. Jon used Alton Brown's method of cooking the roast under a terra cotta pot (yes, we took the roast into Home Depot with us to make sure we bought a pot that it would fit in), and it came out SO tender and juicy. We bought way too much meat -- Jon looked like he had a Flintstones-size hunk of beef on his plate, bone and all. Needless to say, we had lots of leftovers for prime rib sammiches. Yum.

Originally, I was going to make a yule log for dessert -- it was a nightmare. Complete disaster. A couple of factors probably contributed to this: 1) I didn't really have a good recipe -- as I discovered once I started baking, 2) I was baking at around midnight, which probably isn't a good idea. This is what I wound up with:



Yeah. Not great. Luckily, we had leftover cheesecake.

All in all, a great holiday. I'll wrap up my epic most with a few more random pictures:

Our daughter already has good musical taste.

She seems to have a real liking for The Decembrists. Every time I put them on, she calms right down and listens to them. They are fantastic, though, so who can blame her? (By the way, if you haven't heard their album The Crane Wife, you are seriously missing out.)

I totally forgot to mention it, but this past Wednesday was our 3rd anniversary (insert obligatory "awwwww" here). We've been in such a whirlwind lately, we both didn't even get a chance to say "happy anniversary" to each other till 12:06 AM the day after. We did go to a really nice dinner out at Fleming's while Mom and Dad watched Ella for us. I was going to scan in a few photos from our wedding, but my scanner doesn't want to work for some reason.

Yesterday we went to Raleigh for a big family gathering at my aunt and uncle's house. My cousin and her 2 kids were in from Denver, and another aunt was in from NJ, so it was nice to have Ella meet some more new relatives. She did really well around so many people, too.

Some more big news coming up later next week...I can't say anything yet, but I'll just keep you in suspense....

And just because I'm usually behind the camera, here's a shot of Ella and me, courtesy of the iMac:

Fall is in the air!

And just in time for the start of hockey season, too! I actually had to turn the heat on yesterday morning and this morning to knock the chill out of the air when I got up. It's still a little warmer than it should be during the day, but it's been dipping down into the 40s at night.

I still have no confirmation on what the situation with my job is. We thought we had it worked out, but then it turned out that Jon wasn't going to be changing his schedule at all, so I would need to work mornings instead of evenings. Well, they don't need anyone in the mornings (never mind the fact that I worked mornings before I went out on leave). So my boss is checking with her boss to see if there's the possibility of me just going back to my old position (I'm on loan now to a different department), but it's been over a week since I spoke to her, and no word yet. I'm not holding out a lot of hope at this point, really. So things might get interesting here in a little while.

Ella's been doing great lately. She can hold onto a rattle now for a little while, and the other night, she would sit it down and then pick it back up with the other hand. That seems smart, but it might have just been sheer luck, who knows? :) The big news is that she's been sleeping through the night -- we're talking like 8-9 hours -- for the past couple of weeks! She has her last bottle of the night, and typically starts getting fussy around 12:00-12:30 am. We change her, put her down, and she's usually asleep within 15-20 minutes max. It's fantastic.

Some of the Canadians are coming down next week to meet her (well, and to see us too, but mainly to meet her, haha), and we're looking forward to that.

A milestone day!

Eleanor's icky umbilical stump is GONE -- woohoo! It came off today while we were over at Mom and Dad's. This means two things: 1) real baths! 2) cloth diapers! We were holding off on the cloth until the stump fell off b/c there was no way to fold the diapers down so they didn't rub... now that the stump is gone, it's cloth time. Yay!

Also, I'm 4.5 pounds UNDER my pre-pregnancy weight! Don't ask me how THAT happened.

My grandma, aunt, and cousin are up from Georgia and got to meet Ella for the first time today. I'm going to take her back over on Saturday so she can visit with them again before they leave...I'll try to remember to take pictures then.

Baby showers!

I would have posted about this earlier, but a nasty head cold has beat me down. Summertime colds suck... summertime colds when you're 36 weeks pregnant suck even more.

Anyway, I had 2 baby showers last week! The first one was last Tuesday, given by the folks on my team at work. I knew they were going to throw one for me, but they really went above and beyond...it was really nice. We got lots of good loot and some Amex gift cheques as well. Can't gripe about that!

The second one was on Saturday...a big ol' shindig thrown by my aunts. We decided it would be easier to do one all-encompassing shower for both friends and family, so we had everyone over to my parents' house for a very casual BBQ. Jon and I were both SHOCKED at the amount of stuff people got us. Amazing. We have some seriously generous people in our lives...we're very lucky :) Here are a few photos from the event:





And here is the cake made by the incredibly talented Sara...it matches the bedding we picked out, and she did it all freehand!



From what I can tell, the baby is still head up, so no change there as of yet, anyway.