Reid did pretty well at Christmas time. We were pleased to be able to host lots and lots of friends and family all through the holiday season, and Reid faced changing schedules, lots of new folks and a near constant stream of toys, books and other amusements with aplomb.

As you can see above, Christmas morning saw Reid tear into his duties as primary un-wrapper of gifts. Christmastime is really a bell curve, with the morning of the 25th at the top. The slow beginning to the season, exchanging gifts with some friends a little early, gave Reid solid training on the unwrapping. By 12/25 he was a certified expert at the package-attack.

Nothing was a miss this year. Reid received a variety of gifts, including a Leap Frog shopping cart full of scan-able groceries. Reid scanned his head, treating the scanner like a telephone, which he also does with...everything else, including bananas, remote controls and the dog. The little shopping cart gives a satisfying beep when you scan something, even your head.

Reid also received a big blue gigantic floor pillow (sort of the modern successor to the tiny-pellet-leaking bean bag of my youth) which you can see in the background of the picture above. Also received by the little man was a variety of little-people products, including a playground and a carwash. He also received a band in a box.

The band in a box isn't exactly a band, just a wide variety of very, very loud instruments. K and I are passing the blame for who thought this would be a good idea, but I know in truth that I selected the gift, but can only say that I was certain we would lose most if not all of the parts within a week or two.

He loves it. The cymbals crash, the clacker smacks, the knocker knocks, the triangle clangs and the tambourine makes the whole thing sound like a cascading kitchen-disaster. Reid, K and I will all grab instruments and go to town, playing no particular song for longer than anyone should be forced to listen. But the smile on his face is beautiful music.

I can't believe Christmas is practically here. I know things got kind of quiet around the old Hardlyborn, but as ever, life overtakes all other events. Here it is, the eve of Christmas Eve and it's been two weeks since K returned from her travels and the entire family was reunited. Such fun.

After much deliberation, Reid and I decided to launch an expedition to retrieve his mom from the airport, versus allowing her to fend for herself with airport taxis and whatnot. Even though she is a jaded business traveler, and she had been in transit from a wartorn Middle Eastern nation, her heart still melted when that half-pint went streaking across the customs greeting area as she rounded the corner through the big one-way doors. Such simple pleasures life offers us.

We've spent most of the last two weeks preparing for Christmas and getting back to normal. My misadventures with the tree continued, and I did, in fact, permanently break our old Christmas tree stand. Fortunately, a new stand has taken its place, and lends a surprising amount of stability to the wopperjarred conifer that now squats in our living room (though we still need to weigh down the base with a sack of something or other). Nonetheless, Katrena was pleased to see a tree in residence, and soon after she returned home, we decorated the tree and now love having it aglow in the background as we chase Reid around. While he seems to understand there is a tree in our house, he has only removed one or two ornaments, and gingerly. He has great respect for the tree. So far.

During a recent cold snap, K and I went crazy and decorated the front of the house. We figured since we're staking a claim on Christmas at home, we might as well do it up. Several frigid hours of entwining garland and lights later, we've got a fairly classical twinkling boughs of pine effect going out front. Quite festive.

As we've made the rounds seeing friends who were heading out of town and whatnot, Reid has begun to collect some fancy gifts. It is amazing how quickly he has begun to understand the concept of a wrapped gift as something you willfully destroy the outside of to gain access to the fun playtime within. Just a week ago he was hestitant. Now he tears into the boxes with gusto. Last night we were at a dinner and one of us received a small gift from the hostess. Before anyone else could think to open theirs, Reid had shredded the wrapping on ours and was working on plain old tearing up the box. He's in training for 12/25.

I'll hopefully have a full array of photos of Reid's Christmas morning triumphs sometime in the next few days. The great thing about our decision to stay home, though, is that it's giving Reid a dose of Christmas' real meaning: family and friends gathered around together. Tomorrow night we host some of our close friends new and old for a modified version of the traditional Italian feast of seven fishes and spaghetti and oil. Then Christmas day the Hendersons come in for a few days of celebrating and babysitting, then a few days after that, my mom will join us, followed by my dad. Reid will be surrounded by family and friends for a week!

Merry Christmas. (Above is a picture of Reid playing with one of his latest acquisitions, the Chico Flip and Play Activity Table. Here we have Reid and my mom in front of her Christmas tree.)

I didn't want to leave the RPOD with just that big old pile of out-takes. Plus, I have a jarring story to tell.

Reid took off his diaper last night.

Twice.

If you closely monitor the Hardly Born, you'll note that we've been pretty lucky with illness. Reid gets colds, Reid gets fevers which are disconcerting right up until the fever breaks, Reid keeps hitting his head and doesn't care, etc. And we've been very fortunate with diaper rash. Reid has had a couple of bad cases, but for the most part it hasn't been terrible. The hardest part, as is the case with all most all of Reid's maladies, is being his parent when this happens. You can't make him feel better. His behind is burning and I'm agitating it with a diaper and some messy ointment.

So the other night, Reid came home from daycare with one heckuva case of diaper rash. After an evening of meanie shouting and bad behavior, we went on up to bed. After a rash-shortened bath, we went to bed. I put Reid down with a pajama top and just a diaper to keep pressure on his behind to a minimum. This was my first mistake.

This was at eight o'clock. Listening on the monitor, I noticed he struggled around for a while before falling to sleep. This isn't unheard of. However, when I went into to check on him at midnight, I noticed in the half-light a disturbing sight. Thrust in the air was Reid's behind, diaperless. I was panicked. I carefully reattached the diaper to his bum. I was proud of not waking him. I don't understand why I wasn't worried about the peeing that had occurred between about 9 and 12. This was my second mistake.

At 6 when Reid woke up, he was stripped from the waist again, and the crib wasn't pretty. Nothing terrible, but not pretty. But, there was an upside. His diaper rash was almost gone. Apparently, the best and only cure for diaper rash is...air.

Tonight, Reid played with his favorite toy. A box.

K's safely on her way back home, so I thought I'd try an experiment. To make the RPOD's possible (and I know, of course, that the collection of RPOD photography is by no means high art), we here at Rizkerson industries have to take a lot of pictures. I mean a lot.

Photography in this quantity means a lot of flubs. Reid is an unpredictable kid. He turns his head, screws up his facial expression from a smile into a weird smirk, closes his eyes, falls down, whatever.

So I went drilling through just the photos to find a little collection of the examples of these flubs. For scale, I posted about 16 pictures not including the ones I'm posting here. I took about 350 photos over the course of the nine days I've been posting RPODs since K left. Here are some that didn't quite make the cut:

I guess I was counting my chickens a little bit with the whole 'Reid's become a good eater' thing. Tonight, Reid completely ignored a delicious meal I prepared, one which he had actually eaten like a champ about a week ago. Everything about it was deliciously prepared, and Reid destroyed it and ignored me entirely.

I made some strategic mistakes, of course. Last time, I cooked rice with golden raisins and seasoned the chicken with a delectable smoky pineapple sauce I found in our fridge. Reid tossed around the rice a little, but his primary mission was rooting out the raisins while I inserted chicken into his mouth, leading to his eventual consumption of a whole chicken breast. I judged the overall amount of rice rossed about the kitchen table as "acceptable."

This time, I was out of speedy rice. Everything about preparing food for Reid comes back to the need for speed. His hunger had snuck up on me, so I needed a super-speedy starch to go with my rapidly thawing microwave chicken. There's only one solution: cous cous.

Of course, Reid's level of destruction with something so much more granular than rice as cous cous was incalculable. There was cous cous everywhere. And the chicken. Oh, the chicken. So tragic. In the end, Reid essentially ate nothing, and I didn't get that much in either.

Apropos of nothing, here's a picture of Reid grimacing in his car seat. This weekend, Reid and I took a disastrous car trip wherein we tried to go Christmas shopping and failed. Reid fell asleep in his seat (moments after this photo was taken, actually), and when I arrived at Northern Virginia's favorite megamall, I was unable to find a parking space. Of course, I didn't have the right stroller (it's advantageous to have the full-size model to facilitate sleep-shopping, something I'd like to be able to do from time to time). Disappointed and not completely convinced that there wasn't some providential intervention involved, I drove on, eventually just giving the boy a huge nap in the car before heading over to a toy store for some distracting while daddy sipped his coffee.

I think we're buying K's gift online this year.

I've been struggling with the Blogger lately, but I spent a healthy dose of time today at work interacting with the Rizkerson.com hosting provider (Extremely Cheap Hosting(tm)), and hopefully, everything is working fine now.

I have to admit that I like it when things naturally fall into a narrative. I've been writing this week about Reid's surprising eating habits lately. He's been an absolute eating machine. We've plowed through healthy servings of kabob, souvlaki, chicken tacos, non-dinners including an adult-sized portion of eggs, an entire grilled cheese sandwich and a meatball hoagie. He just hasn't stopped eating.

"I think he's having a growth spurt," K suggested to me the other day as I recounted his latest culinary adventures.

I think she might be right, as these pictures seem to confirm. I don't know what we're going to do. I happened to peek over his shoulder while Reid was standing on the household scale and going "mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" while spitting. He weighs 23 pounds, which he has weighed for a while. So he isn't necessarily getting heavier, but he does appear to be getting taller, in the torso and even to a lesser degree in the legs.

We were talking about upgrading his diaper size after a couple of leak incidents, but upon closer inspection, the diaper is still fine around his waist, and the he's way under the weight cut-off for upgrading to size fives. But he just seems to be stretching. We're finding that shirts aren't fitting and the waists on his pants still pretty big.

The other day, I tried on the Christmas outfit K bought for Reid. The shirt and sweater fit pretty well, breaking right at the waist. But the pants were gigantic on him. I could have fit another kid in there. Uh oh.

Today was an interesting day for Reid, but unfortunately, I don't have any photography to back that claim up. This morning we woke up and everything was normal. And then we got an extra dog for about three hours.

A friend needed a place to drop off an adorable black lab/basset hound for a few hours. I was more than glad to oblige. Puppies are among the universal cutest things on four legs. This one was no different. But what was great was seeing Reid interact with the new puppy. He was very forward with her, not running away like he does from some other dogs, including my sisters. He did cling to me a bit. What was most exciting was his constant repetition of the word "dog."

Seriously, it was very close to dog. It was the word he says when we say the name of our dog Dixie to him. He points in a strange way, half pointing to something and half holding his finger up in the gesture of "one second," and he says "dah." And today, with much more excitement and staring at me to make sure he was getting it right he kept saying, "dah! dah!" That's right, I told him. She's another dog.

We walked the two dogs. Reid has been walking Dixie lately, which demonstrates enormous patience in our 11 year old cocker spaniel, but this time I put him in the stroller and held the leashes myself. Eventually, it was too much and I left Dixie to walk herself so I could fully devote my attention to chatting with Reid and reining in the little lab, whose name isn't settled on yet.

Then, after the lab's owner came to take her home, we headed over to a little church and picked up a Christmas tree. Reid saw the arrival of my mom's Christmas tree last weekend after Thanksgiving, so he wasn't impressed that I had a tree on our car. I was. Once I got it home, I realized the drawback of shopping for a Christmas tree with only a 17-month old baby to tell you whether the tree is goofy looking. I picked a pretty goofy looking tree, and K's gonna make fun of me for it. But it's the first tree we're going to actually wake up with on a Christmas morning in our house, so it will be special, even though it's terribly lop-sided, and manages to look crooked no matter what you do with it. Oh, and I think I broke the Christmas tree stand putting the tree up. Well, the season has begun.

Reid has rediscovered some toys lately. One is a baseball game with a ball on an arm that you're supposed to hit and then enjoy the feedback of "home run!" or "you hit a single!" Reid now loves this toy, after initially playing with it and then sort of losing interest. He played for twenty minutes nonstop, mugging and banging the thing and, eventually, eating the ball.

We had a fun time today, Reid and I. Things have been going pretty well this week despite K's absence. It is interesting to note (and I'm knocking on wood here at my desk) that the past two trips K has taken have all coincided with a surprising and disturbing illness in Reid. The first time, a dreadful pre-RPOD trip she took to Bosnia in July triggered a nasty bout of what I will only refer to on the HardlyBorn as "The Big D," because it's a family blog. Let's just say everybody was getting a lot of baths and pedialyte that week. Then the last trip, when RPOD was born, brought a fever and cold.

This time, things are going well. I mean, the house is still a mess (I'm just one man), but the boy is reasonably clean and remarkably well-fed (our recent string of feeding failures has ended), nothing has caught fire or completely ceased to function, and to the best of my knowledge, Reid has only ingested one third of one page of a Target circular. Maybe a half.

Speaking of food, in addition to the baby in a bag trick Reid pulled off in the shot above, we also had a spectacular lunch of some pasta I found in a cabinet and some sauce from a jar. Frankly, I was thinking that my recent success getting Reid to eat had something to do with a bizarre selection of food (kabobs, tacos, eggs). However, today's pasta and sauce meal, a tried and true family favorite that Reid routinely has rejected recently, was accepted heartily, as you can see.

Since K went out of town, everything has been going pretty smoothly with Reid and I, knock on wood. There is the matter of the wake-up, however, which is for some reason gradually sliding earlier and earlier. This morning, we topped out at 5:30 am. If this keeps up, I'm not sure how much of next week I'll make it through. Fortunately for me, this weekend I'm going to completely conform to Reid's sleep schedule, including naps and going to bed at 8. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Our friend Oliver stopped by tonight and I offered to snap a picture of Reid and his dad for the RPOD. I promise I'll have one that doesn't feature my big mug tomorrow.

Reid had a busy night playing this evening. So much so that most of the pictures I took are action shots that make it seem as if Reid is constantly frowning with concentration but otherwise moving without end. This is because when Reid is working busily away at destroying our living room and his toy selection, he gives it his all.

He really is a committed little player. We have noticed that he is outgrowing some of his toys. Tomorrow I will throw onto the site a picture of Reid playing with a toy he received over the weekend. It is a bunch of wooden boxes which nest in each other. What Reid especially likes to do is lift the entire thing over his head and then react with surprise when the inside boxes bludgeon him. Great fun!

Truthfully, though, the most amazing thing about Reid's play, I think, is his sense of mischief. He will sink into playing and quietly work away at something for a while, to the point where you almost feel like you can pick up a magazine or close your eyes for a second. And it is precisely that moment when he realizes that he hasn't interacted with you in a little while. And he will creep over, not really sneaking, but trying to look casual about the whole thing, and then slyly try and catch your eye like he isn't really trying.

I love it.

Short post tonight, as Daddy had a long evening paying bills and balancing the checkbook while simultaneously watching crime dramas on TV. We did, however, have a chance, Reid and I, to do a little Christmas shopping for his mom. Well, pre-shopping, anyhow. Reid was helping me browse through some of the catalogs of jewels that his mom has conveniently had delivered to our house while she's out of town. Needless to say, Reid's tastes run to the extravagant, so we disagreed about whether to sell the villa in St. Croix to buy some of the items Reid felt were "musts." In the end, Reid insisted on calling our broker and demanding to know what the asset picture was going into the holiday season. Who would think that a child of merely 17 months would have mastered the finer points of portfolio management?