Christmas round-up

I won't even try to go through everything that's happened in the past week or so. It's sort of been a whirlwind of dollmaking, cooking, baking, woodworking, happy screaming kids, ticked off screaming kids, D&D miniatures games, Munchkin games, buying expensive new yarn, and that sort of thing.

Christmas day was pretty much what you'd expect from a not-quite-two-year-old ... she had the attention span of a small insect, wanted to play with the bows as much as with her toys, and it took us forever to open presents. Gifts that were supposed to be big hits were received with barely concealed contempt ("Oh, a wooden apple I can lace this fake worm through. How nice."), while small things bought on a whim stole the show ("A fairy wand that's like a tuning fork and goes "TING" when you hit things with it? Hot diggety! Look it dings on the coffee table, and mama's forehead, and the cat, and the glass storm door, and ...").

Here's me and Liza with our two favorite presents - the $5 fairy wand and a pair of $10 slipper socks (with pompoms on the ties!) that Jason bought me so he'd get free shipping on the rest of his order:

Liza has been moderately enthusiastic about her "big" present, an inflatable ride-on bouncy horse thing called a Rody.

I think we'll be returning the rocker base we bought separately, since it makes the horse too high for Liza to get onto by herself, and she doesn't seem to have the hang of rocking, anyway. She likes to sit on it and bounce up and down, though, and she was absolutely enthralled by how our friends' kids used it, bouncing laps around the house at the pace of a thoroughbred. Absolutely frightening how fast those kids could go on this thing, especially with two toddlers around who don't know enough to get out of the way.

Of course, Liza was just as enthralled with the air mattress we had set up for the boys to sleep on, and the bouncing and leaping and cracking-open-of-skulls opportunities it afforded. We've been halfheartedly trying to convince Liza not to jump on her bed, and I think that air mattress has set our effort back by at least a week or two, if not more. On the positive side, though, she can now jump off of a short thing (like an air mattress) and land on her feet on something lower (like the floor). Can't wait until I turn my back for a minute and she tries that off of her regular-height bed. Yep, we've got 911 on speed dial. How'd you know?