And how was your holiday?

Ours wasn't bad. Among other things, I got to watch The Baby Whisperer in action. The S.O. is one of those people who small children and dogs love. If an infant is crying, hand it to him and it will usually decide it has better things to do. Not always, of course, but a lot more consistently than if someone is foolish enough to hand the grub to me. I've never been particularly fond of babies -- they're generally a tad too unfinished looking, not to mention the being wet at both ends and emitting unpleasant discharges. And, just like dogs can smell fear, infants can usually sense that I'm not comfortable holding them. Pass an infant to the S.O., though, and the child takes about 2 seconds to make a couple odd little "life is good" contented grunting noises and then falls asleep.

Anyway, the photo is of the S.O. and the latest twig on the family tree, Piper, born December 11 and definitely still in the grub stage. She was all of eleven days old at the time the photo was taken. We made two trips to the older grandson's house this past week, one just before Christmas to drop things off in case we couldn't get there again for awhile due to bad weather, and one yesterday to have a belated Christmas dinner. It was nice. The grandson is now 24 and seems to have turned out reasonably well -- he's gainfully employed and he's happy being a dad. This was the second year we've done Christmas at his house; he was talking about making switching things up a little next year and coming here to the farm. Which would be nice, except this house is much too small and the guest quarters are not winterized. Although with a little bit of advance planning it would be do-able -- there are motels in L'Anse and Baraga. There is no rule that says planning to have Christmas dinner at our house would also entail everyone staying here overnight. (In fact, that's what the S.O. and I did last year -- booked a motel room in Ironwood to avoid the possibility of driving the 100 miles home in a snowstorm at night. This year we did it as a day trip, although we went prepared for an overnight stay if the weather turned nasty after we got there.)

Justin did suggest an alternate plan. Instead of celebrating the holidays here in the U.P. we could all descend on his aunt Tammi for a week. I wonder how much advance warning we should give her?