8 Month old a week before Christmas

Within the past month, Malaya has started exploring beyond the bedroom door, eating finger foods (its a mess, but its a step towards autonomy!!!), added "Baby" "Babab" (byebye) and "Mamam/Mommy/Ammu" to his vocabulary. More importantly, he knows I'm mamam!

He only says Mamam when he's crying tho. Which he does a lot more often these days. The boy is frustrated he can't go everywhere. We keep him away from the wires, from the kittens, from our footwear. And on most days, we're successful.

... most days...

We can't help it if the kittens run to him.

With Christmas being around the corner, we're almost tempted to just leave a couple of christmas lights lying around so we can get the baby+christmas lights greeting card photo everyone's doing.

Maybe not.

But yes my dear readers. Heathens that we are, we too are celebrating Christmas. Why? Because Mamita got Malaya a tree. 

Damn right it's purple.

I'm no Grinch. I'm the kid who stayed out on our lawn every night every Christmas season to listen to carolers and watch the christmas lights turn laser when I swung by on my swing. I'm the kid who insisted my muslim father should give gifts to all my friends and cousins because they all believed in the Santa Claus story and Abbu had the right belly size.

I love Christmas/Saturnalia/the Yuletide season. Humanity has for centuries. Way way before Capitalists did. It's a celebration of life, and Malaya's first year-ender thing. I'll take any excuse to celebrate this boy. Haha.

I'm also trying to infect the Daddy Creature with the Christmas Spirit. Correction: He says its there, just really really deep inside and I haven't made an effort to pull it out of him yet.

Check out the boy's new chompers:

To all the secret Santas in Malaya's life, he's been a good boy this year and mommy wants a bunch of beautifully illustrated children's books, because he's starting to pay attention to the book's illustrations when we read "The House in The Night" to him, and frankly, I'm getting tired of reading the same two books.

But if you want to know what this boy really wants for Christmas, this cute post is a closer approximation:

http://theuglyvolvo.com/2013/12/10/a-ten-month-olds-letter-to-santa/

Happy Saturnalia!