I miss our Christmas tree. We went up to the mountains and the kids picked a perfect one. There was no resisting the opportunity to recreate the photo I took few years back at the same tree farm, so I posed them. The original, though? Not posed. I said, Hey! Lemme take your picture! and then got so much undeserved shade from each one of them.

We had a really great Christmas this year – hosted at our house both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It was an awesome blur of cooking and eating and cousins.

I’m mad at myself for not taking enough photos.

A few days after Christmas, my sister’s first baby was born. He is ridiculously cute.

Even (especially?) when he sneezes.

The day he was born I sat next to my sister’s hospital bed and held him for hours while he slept and we talked. It’s been such a long time since my kids were babies; I was a little nervous at first to hold him. It’s different holding a newborn now that my first baby is eighteen and getting ready to start college. I couldn’t help but say that it paradoxically all goes by too fast — eighteen years in an instant made up of so many days where it felt like bedtime would never arrive and the clock dragged through impossibly long afternoons.