Holiday Notes

Christmas Reading:

Evan finished the Lord of the Rings trilogy in short order. Matthew received some Redwall books for Christmas which enticed him away from Middle Earth. I told him that he did not have to finish the trilogy, but he pointed out that since he's already read 600 pages, he might as well finish. He just needed a break. In fact, I spotted him reading The Adventures of Bobby Racoon by Thornton Burgess and Evan sped through four books from the Sugar Creek Gang. They have wide-ranging tastes!

Christmas Toys:

My dad commissioned Aunt Beth to play Mrs. Claus and procur a toy vacuum for Logan. We put batteries in the toy, but took them out again after Logan cried, "No, no, no, no, no!" every time it got switched on. He can make his own, non-threatening vacuum noises, thank you very much.



James and I gave Evan and Matthew the joint gift of a programmable robot to their delight and to Logan's fright. The poor kid thinks that the bot is out to get him.

Christmas seemed anticlimactic to Sophie due to her parents' absentmindedness. James bought Sophie a bike which we meant to take out of the back of the van and hide. When I got in the van to ride to church Sunday morning, Sophie sweetly asked me, "Is that my purple bike with butterflies on the wheels?" Sigh. And Merry Christmas.

Christmas-Time Play:

The day after Christmas, the boys stormed the neighborhood, shoveling even the neighbors' driveways. Their motives were purely mercenary as they dumped the snow into our yard to build another fort. Last week, we watched on in disgust as someone in a white Toyota truck intentionally drove repeatedly over the previous fort that the kids had built in the center of the cul-de-sac. We decided that, as the driver didn't exactly check to see whether any children inhabited the fort before he worked his destruction, the kids should build all future forts in our yard... Even Logan enjoyed dragging a shovel around, while Sophie rode her bike in the snow.