Blends With Savanna Grasses: Happy Holidays

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Happy Holidays

This Christmas was really good this year. As is our tradition, the kids and I put up and trimmed the Christmas tree a few weeks before Christmas (12/10/07 to be exact). We had fun rediscovering all of the ornaments we'd stored away last year. And we listened to and sang Christmas songs while we hung them up.

Picking out the stockings was a bit of mini-adventure too, since Katie had some preferences that made it kind'a funny and silly to accommodate.

I had a huge amount of fun selecting the gifts for each of the kids and imagining how much fun

they'd have with each of their presents. I've also gotten to the point where I don't much like shopping. So I went the on-line route and had, overall, a good experience. I have one exchange to make still, so I'll reserve judgement on whether it was a great shopping experience in total. Shipping, evidently, is pretty tight for Amazon though. Check out this package...

Everybody got a "big" present for the season. Dylan's favorite was pretty obvious since he asked for and got pretty much just one big present - a new Les Paul Custom. And just cause he needed it so much, I also got him a Line-6 POD multi-effects device so that he can now make just about every sound imaginable with his guitar.

Emily's big present was a beautiful boxed set of every Calvin & Hobbes cartoon ever done. She's read it voraciously since then. But I wonder if she didn't enjoy the little clay set I'd gotten her. Years ago, she demonstrated a real talent for making figurines and this gift was right up her artistic alley. I think this little dinosaur with tophat, mustache, and monicle illustrates her talent pretty well.

For a long time, I'd searched for an affordable kiln for her. I was surprised by how expensive and complex they were. So I was delighted when I found that one of my favorite toy companies, Klutz, has this stuff called Polymer Clay that you can simply back in the oven. Oh Joy!

Anna's favorite gift was the Cranium Mega Fort. She'd been disassembling my family room furniture for years and dragging in blankets for years to make them into forts. Now she's got all sorts of cool equipment to make her own forts. And I'm super happy because I don't have to spend an hour putting the house back together after she gets on one of her jags.

Katie's favorite gift was either her Moon Sand or their punching bag with gloves. Now, Moon Sand is the bane of any sane parent. It's very messy and requires constant clean-up or total apathy to having the sandy stuff all over your floors, walls, etc. The punching bag, on the other hand, has been a blast. Katie is the most kinetic and active of all the kids and so anything that is both fun and tiring for her is great for us. The punching bag also had some hilarious Engrish on the box labels.