Well, with Black Friday over with, despite the holiday season going into the final stretch, things have been relatively laid back and calm around here lately. As I told you folks before, we've been over and done with 95% of your holiday shopping for over a month, so with the exception of Black Friday and a few random items Kris picked up while braving the morning's madness, we haven't had to pick anything else up.
We're leaving for Michigan in three days. Once I get out of work on Wednesday, I'm going to head back to the house, we're going to do a once-over of the house making sure everything's locked up and shut off, and we're going to set out for northern Georgia where we've reserved a hotel room (my goal is to get there by 2am).
Seeing how our trip is a few days off and all, we've been preparing like crazy for the two days in a car with a toddler and an infant. I've created a few different custom DVDs for the girls in order to keep them occupied on the road, made up of all the old school, classic Christmas specials from back in the 80s. Old Disney cartoons, the Muppets, Sesame Street, etc. The usual. We're bringing a case full of movies for them, too - Disney movies, SpongeBob, Yo Gabba Gabba, Christmas classics, etc.
I'm being an optimist and am also throwing in the Indiana Jones and original Star Wars trilogies, as well as the Arrested Development series... but more likely than not I'm never going to get a chance of watching them.
Anyway, seeing how we're leaving in a few days for a slew of family Christmases, we opted to have our own, immediate family Christmas at home with the girls. Something low key that would prevent us from having to haul all of our presents for the girls all the way up to Michigan just to turn around and bring them all the way back.
That would've been stupid.So we had the girls open up their stockings and their gifts from us. Abby probably didn't know anything was out of the ordinary when she got up in the morning, but Cannonball sure enough freaked out when she saw everything under the tree. Always cool to see kids have fun celebrating the true meaning of Christmas...
Kris and I, according to Hough tradition, exchanged this year's annual Christmas ornaments. Every year since we came back from Shittsville (a.k.a. Ghana), we've bought each other a Hallmark ornament for our tree. At first, this came from necessity, as we had no ornaments ourselves and were in need of building up a collection.
Now, as we've abolished our Charlie Brown Christmas tree to Hades and have upgraded to a fancy, taller tree, we're still in need of additional ornaments to fill in all the new space. This year, I got Kris a UNICEF ornament (fitting her personality), and she got me a Muppets ornament (fitting to my personality). Everybody wins.
I had no idea a two year old could take so long opening presents. We were sitting on the floor in front of that stupid tree for a solid two hours opening gifts.
As can be expected, the boxes the presents came from were as big a hit as the gifts themselves... and every time a gift was opened, it had to be played with and mauled until one of us tore it away from them and kept the gift-giving momentum going. This isn't a huge deal if one kid's doing it, and everybody else has stuff to open, but after awhile it all came down to two adults waiting on a two year old to open her next gift, while the 7 month old shoved copious amounts of wrapping paper in her mouth.
Abby didn't get a whole hell of a lot to open Christmas morning (observed) from us this year (no offense, kid). Like I said before, we put about 80% of the money we spent on her this year directly into her credit union savings account. Maybe not a 'fun' thing to do, but she's got all of Alayna's old crap lying around the house, and all she wants to do with anything anyway is shove it in her mouth and drool all over it.Did I mention she's sitting upright now? Pretty sure I did. Anyway, she's sitting up now. Falls down a lot, and she's hit her head so much I'm pretty sure I can safely rule out medical or law school in this girl's future, but she is sitting up. Huzzah.
Alayna's main gift from us, that Fisher Price iXL thing I was talking to you about before (think iPad for toddlers), was a pretty big hit. It's a complex, little piece of hardware, but she seems to already have the jist (gist?) of it. She's been raised around cell phones, iPods, and the like, so she's probably more proficient than most when it comes to handheld electronics....I don't know if that's really, really cool or really, really lame.
Yulin',
- Brian
