'Twas the week before Christmas

And all through the house...

Wait, do you really expect me to come up with a poem here? Sorry to disappoint, but alas, I am not. :oP

I seem to have caught whatever the little miss has. My throat hurts, I've been sneezing, my voice sounds deeper (and sexier?) and my head is stuffy. At least I have the ability to blow my nose and clear the mucus out, unlike my poor lil dd, so I don't think I'll get it as bad as she has.

She is doing a bit better today. The mornings are the worst for her though. She coughs and coughs until she throws up. :(

She's starting to express a bit of an interest in food again. She ate about 12 grapes, 1 Ting, a couple bites of O cereal and a bite of a noodle so far today. That's a big improvement over yesterday when all she had were a few grapes. It's times like these that I'm so thankful she's still nursing, especially when she wouldn't drink hardly anything yesterday. I tried different cups, different things to drink - she just wasn't interested. I finally got her to drink some chocolate rice milk (thought that might be a special enough treat for her to get some other liquids in her). I'm watching her diapers closely. She definitely isn't having the output that she normally has, but she's still wetting diapers so I'm not worried about dehydration.

At the moment she's down for a nap now and I'm thinking about joining her, but thought I'd post a little catch up blog entry first.

Jody and I have agreed (for the sake of conserving money) not to buy anything for each other for Christmas this year. It's hard because I'd really like to buy him something, but having a sick kid in the house makes it easier to keep out of the stores. Of course, there's always online ordering, but I figure anything I got at this point wouldn't make it here in time for Christmas anyway. Bah-humbug.

Our ebay auction on the timeshare ended yesterday. It sold for a whopping $765, less than 10% of what we originally paid for it. Isn't that sad??! But at least we will be completely rid of the thing soon. No more maintenance fees! Woohoo!! :) Now I'm just crossing my fingers that we get the money and the deed transfer goes through ok.

Since I'm on the advisory committee and had volunteered to take free family portraits for some families, I went to the Cherished Children holiday party on Sunday by myself. I was bummed to leave Ava and Jody at home, but she was way too sick to go out and I didn't want to expose all the other kiddies to her crud.

The party had a nice turnout - 10 families in all. I took pictures for four of them. The lighting posed some problems for me, but I'm happy enough with how they turned out. I'll be giving each family a free 5x7. I got to use my Silverlake backdrop for the first time (other than for my family) and try out my new reflector. :) Pretty spiffy.

OK, think I'm going to either go wrap Ava's presents or go lie down - or both. Cheers.