We had all settled in for a long Christmas break

So, yes, it's been forever since I've posted, but since we saw a bunch of you who read this since I've last posted, I thought it might be okay.  That is until Pops asked today whether or not I still even had a blog.  Point taken.  So tonight will be a quick update on Christmas and then I'm off to bed.

The night I last posted, Jack woke up about 

10 times in the first 4 hours of "sleep," so I brought him into bed with me.  He slept wonderfully the rest of the night, but I barely got a wink, and I was convinced that he would never be able to readjust to sleeping alone the next night.  That particular week it may have been just separation anxiety--he's at about the right age for that to happen, and he has had more than a few episodes of "only Mommy will do" in the past month.  But Jack surprised me with about a week of really amazing sleep starting the next night.  Then we disrupted his sleeping patte

rn again by traveling across six time zones, and he hasn't slept well since.

Christmas in both Houston and Warrensburg was wonderful.  Ben and I went out for a date while in Houston, and he gave me a gorgeous Christmas gift--a pair of diamond earrings that are fairly hefty, to say the least--which I haven't taken off since.  On Christmas day Jack saw several of his second cousins as about 30 of the Angelette/Ragland clan gathered at Grammy and Granddad's.  

In Missouri, we made a brief visit to Richmond and then headed back to Warrensburg where we pretended Christmas was on the 27th, which allowed us to go through our Christmas Eve ritual of opening new pajamas and to wake up all together on "Christmas" morning to open stockings and other presents.  

Jack is still the only grandchild on both sides, but our families are still noticeably growing as our siblings pair up and bring people home with them for Christmas.  Aunt Rachel and Chad are now engaged, which kind of adds a new level of meaning to having Chad around, even though he's been a fixture in our family for about five years.  We spent a little time talking wedding plans and Rachel tried her wedding dress on for the first time while we were there.  Tyler has been dating his girlfriend Rachael (yeah, she and my sister Rachel had a fun time messing with people by always sitting next to each other and constantly prompting the "which one?" question, but it's much easier in writing) for two years now, but this Christmas she was there the entire time we were, which was fantastic.  Plus she undeniably gets the award for best Christmas gift given this year.  She gave Tyler the game Rock Band, which Ben and I played with the two of them for at least six hours straight one day.  The first picture is of Ben singing along to it while holding Jack.  The other two pictures are from today, mostly because I haven't sorted through Christmas pictures yet, but also because Jack was wearing an adorable outfit that he got from Melanie and Ankur for Christmas and because he made impressively quick work of completely tearing apart a magazine this evening.  If only he had had as much enthusiasm for unwrapping presents. 

Unfortunately we missed out on seeing Uncle Stephen's new girlfriend Kelly who arrived in Houston just a few hours after we left.  But she sent along a great CD of funky nursery rhymes for Jack, and based on the stories

 Stephen told, I think I'm really going to like her.  

I also had some interesting hair high jinks over Christmas.  Unwisely, in retrospect, I scheduled an appointment for highlights at an Aveda salon in Houston that I found online and had no recommendation for.  Never again.  I said subtle beige highlights and a few lowlights; I ended up with fat gold chunks and no lowlights.  Although I've never done that before, I went back and asked for someone else to redo it.  I came out with tons of little platinum streaks added on to the gold chunks and still no noticeable lowlights.  We're talking seriously blonde here, and I'm not exactly a blonde.  Ben was convinced that if I did anything else to my hair, it would all fall out, and actually I was a little concerned myself, especially given that I'm already operating on less than my normal hair volume.  (One of the things no one ever tells you is that about 4 months after giving birth, hormone drops start causing most women to start losing massive amounts of hair.  As in clog the drain several times amounts of hair.  I was no exception and am now sporting a huge amount of 1 inch long baby hairs and significantly less volume in the rest of my hair.)  So I suffered through all our Christmas pictures without doing anything else to fix my bad dye job, but when we got back to London I just couldn't take it anymore.  An 8 GBP (Great British Pound) bottle of semi-permanent L'Oreal and I'm now sans stripes and with a color a few shades darker than natural and only slightly off what I wanted.  Much better.  And so far my hair hasn't all fallen out yet.  Now if only I could fix all those Christmas pictures.

Preview of the week to come: I'm pretty sure Jack will be standing on his own for significant chunks of time by the end of the week, as today alone he did several 3-4 second stands.  We'll be trying out a few new foods including more meat and a little dairy as I'm starting to worry that Jack might not be getting enough protein.  And on Wednesday we're going to the NHS health clinic to have Jack weighed.  I expect a significant increase over his last weigh-in of 15 pounds, as on the way to church this morning I could barely carry our little chubbler baby!  Along those lines, also hopefully more workouts for me.