Waiting for Santa

Having Mom leave was hard on me. I was really depressed for a couple of weeks and didn't do anything but sit around. It was hard to let her go.

There have been good things happening in the last few weeks, though! Just last week, in fact, Gabrielle became daytime trained! It was very much against her will, but I was fed up with knowing she could exercise control, but chose not to. We had one day that she voluntarily, her own idea, went without her pull ups. The next day she was back to wearing them, though, whereupon I lost my patience. The day after that I took them away and gave her no choice. We've had a couple of accidents, but, mostly she's been doing very well. I just have to keep her disposable crutches out of reach! She still uses them at night, but I can live with that, very easily.

Michael has gone to his mom's for Christmas. It's the first time she's taken that kind of responsibility with him since we got custody. She hasn't felt safe enough with him to do that, so, while she would come to see him and would take him places, she made sure there was either a friend traveling with the two of them, or they were near enough to us for the husband to handle Michael if he started losing control again. So this is a big step forward for them! And Michael was fairly happy to go see his mom, neither apprehensive nor angry. Big sigh of relief all around everyone! We can start to have hope for the future.

Well, I need to get back to the Christmas Eve festivities. The husband will be coming home from church soon. Gabrielle is sick with a cold, so we stayed home, which was disappointing, but couldn't be helped. We made cookies to make up for the loss, though. White chocolate chip, swirled Christmas chip, macadamia nut cookies for Santa (and the rest of us.) Santa will love them, Im sure!