Merry Christmas!

I'm putting this here mostly for Marianne's benefit because she's the only one who didn't get to hear this story.

2:30 am : Cath wakes up wanting to eat. I walk by Eli sleeping in the hall (?) to get her. I take her downstairs, make the bottle, feed her, and when I hold her up to burp her, I see this:

I freak out! What is wrong with her eye? Should I put cold on it? Heat? I wake up Cliff to give her a blessing and then we decide she should go to the ER. She's had a cold for the past 3 days so I thought it might be an infection or something. I vaguely remember her eye being a bit red an slightly puffy the night before. (Also you can see her teeth in this picture.)
3:00 : Cath and I are at the ER. They're pretty quick at 3am on Christmas. Well, relatively quick.
3:45 : The doctor says it's a contusion (i.e. bruise) and prescribes Tylenol.
4:15 : The nurse comes with the Tylenol.
4:30 : We're discharged and go back home to bed. Cliff is still waiting up for us.
7:00 : Eli wakes up and Cliff takes her downstairs.
8:00 : Eli and Cliff come to wake me up. Yeah, he kept her from the presents for a whole hour!
8:06 : Christmas picture without Cath. My policy is to let sleeping babies lie. We dump out stockings.
8:15 : Cath awake. I feed her and then the present opening commences.
8:28 : After one present each, Eli is doing the pee-pee dance and we take a bathroom break. I use this time to take the picture shown above.
8:30 : Cliff takes Eli back upstairs to get new underwear because she was so excited, she forgot to wipe (and it was #2.)
8:33 : Present opening recommences.

Funny things that happened:

1. Cliff went around telling everyone: "If you think Catherine looks bad, you should see the other baby!"
2. Eli was allowed to bring one present to Cliff's brother's house. She chose to bring a broom and dustpan set.
3. When Eli came upstairs to wake me up, I told her that it would help if she scratched my back. She did it for approximately one second and then said, "Okay, time to get up!" She then proceeded to shove me out of bed with her feet.
4. Santa brought Eli two Barbies. She told us that she should have gotten three since she's three years old. Good thing Grandma Merrill brought one.
5. I tried to distract Eli from her tantrum at Uncle Jeff's house by wanting to color with her in her new coloring book. She stopped crying and came right over. I thought I had succeeded until she pointed at the words in the front cover and told me that they said, "No Moms."

Inappropriate things I laughed at (Caution: Read this only if you have a dirty mind.)

1. Cliff said, "Paint my banana yellow." The story of this is too long to put down here.
2. There was a gift bag with "HoHoHo" written all over it which Joe called "the Ho bag." I laughed until tears came out of my eyes and I couldn't breathe.
3. One of the gifts in the exchange was a Hillshire farms gift box. Since I opened it, Dad called it my "beefsteak."