Chicken Pox, weight loss, and the holidays...

My poor little Leila has come down with the chicken pox. Although in actuality, she's really doing just fine. I noticed a few days ago she had what i assumed was just a big baby zit and I didn't think much of it. Then the next day I felt a bump on the back of her head, again not really all that concerned. Then yesterday she had one pop up on her ear lobe and that just seemed odd (I'm glad Kolt didn't let me pierce her ears when we were in Idaho!). So today I called the doctor and took her in and it took 3 doctors to confirm it, but she is in fact, a 3 month old with chicken pox. It took us the better part of the day to figure out how she'd gotten it, turns out our niece has it as well. And after freaking out thinking "Oh my gosh my baby has the chicken pox!" I thought, "Oh, it's just the chicken pox" realizing that especially at her age, it's really no big deal. She has been acting her perfectly pleasant self and if anything is only eating and sleeping a little more. She only had about 5 yesterday but now they're popping up all over her and it's too many to count. My only sadness about this is it may prevent us from going to our friend's house who's deploying this weekend. We'll keep an eye on it and if she's healing then we're definitely going.

I am FINALLY in some pre pregnancy pants!!!!! Granted, they're not the ones I wore directly pre pregnancy as I'd lost 20 lbs before becoming pregnant, but they're not new fat pants and they're not maternity!!!! Mostly I can credit it to an awful stomach bug I had over the weekend. I lost 4 lbs in 3 days. But I have been making a very conscientious effort to eat well. The last several times we've gone out to eat I've eaten from the healthy menu choices, and I'm very proud of myself. I think I've finally shrunk my stomach down and I no longer feel like I'm starving all the time, which of course makes eating well and less much much easier. Hurray for me :)

Everybody keeps talking about how excited they are for Thanksgiving, and how they're putting up Christmas decorations and it just does NOT feel like the holiday season at all to me. I think part of that is we're down here alone with no family so we're not celebrating Thanksgiving (we did have Thanksgiving dinner a week ago with our friends, not to mention the Thanksgiving dinner we had in August, but I think it just doesn't quite feel the same if I'm not home smelling my mom's pecan and chocolate pies.) Kolt does have it off, but I doubt we'll do much else for it since he's "not a fan" of the meal anyways.

Kolt and I have only put up a Christmas tree one year, our first year that we were married and in our own place. It was a tiny tree we borrowed from his sister so we've never bought one. I love the easiness of artificial trees with the lights already strung in them, but I truly don't want to mess with storing one and carting it all over the world. We may look into getting a real tree (especially since disposal would be easy because our garbage company rocks). It just seems like now that we have a daughter, maybe it's time we start decorating a tree and establishing some traditions of our own. Kolt argues that Leila has no clue that it's Christmas so there's no point in doing it this year, which is true, but I really do long for that Christmas-ey feel. If it were colder than 60 outside I think that may help as well. So we'll just have to see. Celebrating, or not celebrating the holidays away from family is definitely one of the hardest parts about being in the military.