The Christmas Birthday Holiday Extravaganza 2007

We're all still reeling a little bit from the festivities over the past couple of days. Christmas and then Bry's first birthday back-to-back turned out to be a bit much. There were gifts, cake, lots of guests, very little, if any napping, at least two giant meals, and one small kitchen fire. Yes, a kitchen fire. Contained inside the oven, but still, I saw flames so I say it counts.

First, Christmas. The entire Eng clan journeyed to Minneapolis to celebrate and were greeted with several inches of snow. This would have been festive, except that it caused Dana and Ryan to slide off the highway and the rest of the family to get stuck before they could leave Wisconsin.

Santa Baby says 'Merry Christmas!'

The "fire" mentioned above was a byproduct of either a too large turkey or a too small roasting pan, depending on how you do the math. About 3 hours after we put the 20-pounder into the oven, a quick check revealed a hole in the roasting bag through which turkey drippings were, well, dripping onto the bottom of our gas oven. I couldn't give you the exact chemical equation, but basically, hot grease on flames seemed to cause an awful lot of smoke, followed by several flaming flare ups inside the oven. Shortly after Steve opened the oven door and was greeted with billowing smoke, the 3 smoke detectors on the ground floor started going off simultaneously. Amidst the cacophony, I was waving kitchen towels somewhat futilely at the smoke detectors, Steve was staring a little blankly at the flames, Grandma E was trouble shooting the fire, and Bry was blithely trying to eat lunch. If he hadn't noticed the fact that mama and daddy had to leave his sight to take care of things, he probably would have totally ignored the screeching smoke detectors.

The flaming oven problem was resolved when Steve stuck a cookie sheet under the roasting pan to catch the remaining drippings. The turkey was finished about 2 hours ahead of schedule and amazingly not burned to a crisp. The only trick was that we needed to scramble to cook the rest of the meal to catch up with the turkey. I put Bry on my back and the whole team pitched in to hurry up the rest of the dinner. An hour later, dinner was served and all was well. Of course, by the time we were ready to eat, Bry was ready to nap from a physically exhausted standpoint, but not so ready to nap from a "I don't want to miss any of the excitement" standpoint. When all was said and done, the adults enjoyed a good meal and Bry enjoyed about a 20-minute nap.

The rest of the evening was devoted to decorating for Bry's birthday party. I had folded about 75 paper cranes in the weeks before the party and my family and Steve helped to fold 25 more so that we could string 100 of them around the basement.

Like this.

And this.

We collapsed into bed, exhausted, that night. It took almost an hour to get Bry down at bedtime. Dude was wired. Yesterday we also found out that Bry has double ear infections, so the poor little man was probably in a fair amount of pain too. We awoke bright and early the next morning, and Steve started working on 3 pans of lasagna for Bry's party at about 6:30 am. After 3 solid hours of cooking (and more smoke detector tripping after one of the pans overflowed), we were good to go.

Bry's party went well, although it got off to somewhat of a slow start. Bry refused to nap that morning up until 15 minutes before the guests were supposed to arrive. He slept for a grand total of 30 minutes and woke up groggy and grumpy. But after some warm up time, he had a blast. He shmoozed with guests, opened more gifts, and enjoyed his very first slice of cake. The cake sequence went like this:

What is this?

Oh, I'm supposed to eat it.

Digging the cake.

I can poke it with a fork, too.

Cake, what cake? Look at this fork!

There was no dramatic headfirst plunging into the cake (as mama had done on her first birthday), and Bry seemed a little annoyed that the frosting stuck fast to his fingers. He did eventually tip the plate over and get red frosting all over his shirt sleeve. Overall though, the cake seemed to rate a definitive eh. The highlight of the party for Bry was this cup, which captured more of his attention than any of his new toys did:

See my cup!

At the end of the day, we were all ready for naps, but it again took a good long time to calm Bry down enough to make that happen. It also took me three days to wind down enough to write this post. Phew. No more celebrations for another year, right?