Couldn’t get a good picture of Kaya’s face painted elf before his eyes got smeared, but it was very impressive.

Our local science museum stays open late during December and runs trains to the North Pole to see Santaevery 20 minutes. We didn’t get to go last year, due to a combination of my work schedule and the fact tickets sell like hot cakes. But this year, we had a very successful Santa Train experience!

Our first snow of the season in Durham this morning!  It didn’t stick around, but it was fun for a few minutes.

This time around, I have started missing work pretty quickly after giving birth and am anxious to get back into my hours of research – you know: sitting in my office, drinking tea, cruising pubmed and playing with my statistical software.  I did, however, get to present a poster briefly last week at a urological oncology meeting in Bethesda (picture below).  Laney, however, is clearly not ready for me to go back to work, as evidenced by the constant nursing and crying that appeared around the 3 week mark.  So, instead I spend all day on the couch jiggling and feeding a newborn.

We went to the annual lighting of the Lucky Strike tower at the American Tobacco Campus this weekend.  The weather was nice and we got to hear a few local school choirs.  Kaya met Stormy from the hurricanes and somehow knows the words to Jingle Bells already.

Our diaper orders now come from Amazon in boxes bigger than Max!

Maybe we should make the UPS guy some Christmas cookies.

Tummy time is a lot more fun when you’re the second child and your big sister does it with you. This is Kaya giving her a pep talk (picture 1) and demonstrating how to lift her head off the ground (picture 2).

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at our house. We picked out a beautiful Christmas tree at the TROSA sale down the street.  Another picture will be coming when we actually manage to get it decorated!

Kaya has made out like a bandit with the arrival of a new baby in the house (well, with the exception of having her Mommy and Daddy time cut drastically down).  It turns out that the whole world is aware that it is hard for a 2 year old to adjust to new babies, and the world has therefore showered her with gifts.  She’s beating Laney by about 3 to 1 in the gift department, although perhaps appropriate as she clearly enjoys her gifts more.  A sample: her new helmet and scooter: