This Week (And a Half) In Christmas

We didn't waste any time getting started on our Christmas Countdown Activities list.

The day after Thanksgiving we bypassed the retail craziness and headed to the Fantasy of Trees instead. Making warm, fuzzy holiday memories beats long lines, crowds, and parking lot battles on any day, in my book.


On the carousel...

What's Veda clinging to? A Thomas sticker book.

Peekaboo!

 

Face painting. Veda loved it. Linus immediately wiped his with his sleeve.

 

 

 

Making a reindeer craft...

See his pitiful face paint? Also, it took about ten seconds for this magic marker to become a "rocket ship pencil". What with all the blasting off, he didn't get much coloring done.

 

 

Driving plasma cars on the toddler race track...

 



 

Then because we weren't quite worn out enough, the kids and I packed up and made the drive through the mountains to my grandmother's house. The kids got to see several members of our extended family, and we came home with some handcrafted piggy banks and a couple of books to add to our read-aloud Advent calendar.

This past Saturday, the kids were supposed to see their first parade. But sometimes Old Man Winter craps all over your Christmas plans, and Linus woke up with a high fever at about 3 am on Friday night. The frankenvirus has been working its way through the Martin house ever since. Linus's primary symptom has been fever, Veda ran a fever and threw up, and I ran a slight fever and had a splitting headache. Frankenvirus - something for everyone!

Missing the parade means that something isn't going to get checked off our activity list, which bothers me in a compulsive sort of way.

Our sick days have afforded us some extra cartoon-watching time, so we've been enjoying Rudolph and the Jingle movie.

Let's see... we also started our Read-Aloud Advent Calendar on the 1st, which we all love.

And we've been doing Elf on the Shelf... but a couple of things about that:

1. This was our elf's grand entrance to our house. I actually put a little thought into this. I set him up on the kitchen counter with his book and "snowballs", donut holes with powdered sugar. I had high hopes when I took this photo. In my mind, they would come running into the kitchen and gleefully wonder about the little guy in red and then fall in love with him when they learned he had brought them a breakfast treat.



What actually happened was that they were grumbling about wanting milk and had absolutely zero interest in the elf.

Me: "Look! What's this?! He's brought you a treat!"
Linus: "I don't like it."
Veda: "It's not Thomas."
Me: "Hey! He brought a book! Let's read the book!"
Veda: "Not right now."
Linus: "I don't want to."

And another thing about this elf - WHY do they not make them with wires already in their little arms and legs? Instead, I'm supposed to find a secretive hour to perform surgery on our elf with gauge wire, wire cutters, and needle-nose pliers. Seriously, WHY??? So, as might have guessed, our elf has not had his surgery yet, which puts some significant limits on his activities. Take, for instance, a couple of nights ago, when I thought it would be cute to have the elf climb one of our houseplants. Due to his lack of surgically-enhanced arms, he fell off during the night, so when Linus discovered him, he was lying face down in the houseplant dirt. Linus: "I'm sad about the elf. He's dirty. He's sad." And you can't touch him all day, because then he'll lose his magic. So our elf spent an entire day looking like a crime show corpse. Mmmm.... nothing like Christmas disappointment.