Home for Christmas

Home for the holidays... The kids had a lot of fun building "pillow" forts, or, having pillows piled on top of them.  There was also lots of racing around and playing with dolls (somehow every piece of doll clothing ended up in our room). I think every stuffed animal in the place also got pulled out and spread around the floor. For awhile, puzzles were the thing (I think because I bought one to do myself, so everyone else wanted to do them, too). Isabella would help Ian with the harder ones. He got so he could do most of them by himself, but of course, always more fun to do with mom, especially if that meant mom had to stop doing her puzzle...

Grandma came to visit, which was, of course, the highlight of the entire holiday. She brought along Christmas piano music and successfully played them on the piano (Ian always tries to play on top of my fingers). I am still being asked for Jingle Bells, which, I think, we didn't actually have music for. Go figure. But the kids really liked to sit and listen to Grandma play.

We decorated the tree with the non-breakable ornaments on the bottom. We did have one Incident - Isabella dropped the Santa Christmas ornament she'd gotten at the Garden shop. It of course shattered. She was heartbroken. I did find a similar replacement, but it wasn't quite the same.

 Christmas morning, stocking time! Or maybe I should just say chocolate delivery time... It took awhile for Ian to figure out that there were things in his stocking, but Isabella had no trouble figuring that one out. To be fair, the stickers were pretty popular too. But they both clearly remembered the chocolate coins from last year. I cleverly forgot to add the Runts to the stockings, which is probably just as well.

We didn't quite adhere to the one present at a time in order rule, but did our best. Isabella was pretty good at reading the tags, but we had to schlep them all from the front room to the back, so we just kind of went through them as we got them.

 Isabella was the recipient of a large number of dress-up dresses from her cousin Calin. Very, very happy. She invented the ballet leotard under the dress look to make up for the fact that many of the dresses are a bit big for her still. The other two popular gifts were the decoratable cupcakes (basically pens and wooden cupcakes) and the Curious George set of games. I'm not sure we've actually *played* the games correctly yet, but we're pretty close with Go Fish. And, of course, Grandma's IPad with Angry Birds, Cash Cow, and Mahjong was a big hit. She can do most of them herself; Ian had some issues. I think he did eventually figure out how to pull the rubber band back and then let go.

Ian's favorite gift, after which there were no other gifts, was the vacuum cleaner. It makes noise. And can be pushed around. Too bad it doesn't actually vacuum... The broom, while it doesn't make noise, is useful for sweeping tiles around the floor.

Isabella was out of day care for quite a while - 14 days or there-abouts. We ended up doing a baby sitter one day, but the other two at Ian's daycare. Apparently the toys and play area are not quite up to snuff with CCC, but she did get to give Ian hugs several times during the day.

The other big treat was that it snowed, sort of, the day after Christmas. So we went outside with Grandma and built snowmen. Well, to be accurate, Grandma and Mom built snowmen, Ian and Isabella stomped on them. Until we ran out of snow we could scrape together to make more snowmen. And Ian's fingers got too cold, because he didn't want to wear his gloves.