I was cleaning up some old files on my laptop and came across this little blog note:

1/30/2004 - Judah is crawling (backward), trying to stand, screams at the top of his lungs just to hear his own voice, loves looking at himself in mirrors, doesn’t like naps anymore, likes banging on things and eating pureed bananas.

That really took me way back considering that Judah is now making his own social engagements. He rode home with a classmate yesterday to play at his house and has informed me that he asked another classmate to come over to play on Tuesday.

We are gearing up for the holiday season. Tonight, we will go downtown to see the lighting of the Neiman-Marcus Christmas Tree and also the lighting of the city tree. There will be street vendors (hot cocoa! hot apple cider!), horse-driven carriages and live entertainment (Trout Fishing in America, eh). Should be a great time and a tradition we have decided to repeat every year. I am putting up our own trees (we do two) this weekend -- never have done this before Thanksgiving, but I just **feel** like doing it and as somebody in Highland Park has already beat me to the punch, I think it's OK for me to break a few rules.

My mom was in the hospital earlier this week in N.C. for vertigo. Pretty scary as they had to run many diagnostic tests to rule out neurological or other nefarious causes. She followed up with her ENT and turns out she has an inner ear infection. She's on the mend and I can sleep at night again. 1,000 miles distance feels like a million when your mama is sick!

How's this for organization? A colleague officially finished her Christmas shopping yesterday and brought the loot for faraway relatives to the office today, all wrapped and ready for shipping. Gosh, I'm so far behind. I'll probably be shopping on 24 December.