Christmas Morning

For the first time in the past couple of years that I can remember in recent memory (actually it may have been the first time ever, I'm not sure) we had Christmas morning at home with just us. It came earlier than I would have liked since I don't think I got to sleep until almost two the night before (my sleep schedule has been a bit whack out recently). It didn't take long for the both kids to be up and ready to come downstairs and open present though. The present opening is best described as mild chaos as the kids zip from present to present barely having time to acknowledge one present before moving on to the next.


Quinn has asked everyone in the family for some form of Lego Batman toy. So he was expecting lots and lots of Lego. So rather than have him guess what all his present were we packed a couple of his presents with some Lego pieces from his existing sets. As he would shake them he would guess they were Legos and this threw him off enough that when the real Lego Rescue Helicopter was unwrapped he could no longer trust whether it was indeed a Lego item or not. In case anyone is overly worried that we crushed his hopes by doing this, one of the items he got in a faux Lego packing was his new MP3 player. Mind you, I'm still having trouble comprehending that my son has need of or even wants his own MP3 player. We didn't get him an iPod (despite the fact that he can be seen using an iPhone headset at the moment because we don't have headphones for him). We did get him a CD / MP3 player (that allows you to either play a normal CD or burn a ton of MP3 onto a CD and play those). He really seems to like it and we bought him a CD of his own with his "favorite band" Relient K (who I had never heard of before). Heck, I didn't even know he had a favorite band. But he really seemed to like the idea of having his own music since he kept it on and playing through most of the day. In addition to that Quinn also got a small Nikon camera (no, it's not the one I have, I still consider that one somewhat useful even though it annoys me at times). Rather Quinn's new camera was one of the low end Nikon Coolpix. The bad thing is it was still low end enough to use AA batteries and not have a rechargeable battery. We're going to try and fix that by having rechargeable AA batteries. Hopefully Quinn won't lose them or throw them away prematurely.




Catherine on the other hand ended up getting lots of Webkinz and Webkinz accessories. She really likes these, which doesn't seem that odd since a lot of kids like them, but she doesn't do the online stuff with them (not that she wouldn't, we've just never told her about that aspect of the toys). I think she just likes the idea of having animals and outfits. Surprisingly one of her favorite things was this Water Wow Dora book that is basically found several pictures of hypercolor (where as you move a wet brush over the picture it becomes colored, then goes back to black and white when it dries). She must have done this every time the pages dried. She also got some art supplies, some doodle books, puzzles and a bunch of other smaller items. And her big item was a Playmobil Helicopter to go with her Hospital that she already has. We're also hoping that Quinn will gift her his old camera, then she can have a camera of her own too.


Later in the day once the kids had time to play with their toys we let them open up some joint gifts. This looked like it was going to be problematic initially with both kids wanting to the primary opener, but between presents Quinn would go off and continue working on his Lego Rescue Helicopter. The joint gift were some board games and Wii Music, basically items / games we can play together as a family.

In case you're wondering about Ginger and myself and what we got, I totally dropped the ball and didn't get Ginger anything at all from me or the kids. I really had planned on going out and getting her something small, but that never really happened. Ginger had the kids get me the new Raving Rabbid TV Game for the Wii (which the kids love, so I like to think it's more of a joint family gift that just happens to have been given to me by the kids). And then on top of having the kids get me something she got me Dr Horrible on DVD. Just so I don't look like a complete heel though, I will say that Ginger and I both decided not to exchange gifts per se this year since we had both gotten several big ticket items prior to the holidays. She got a bunch of stamping supplies, some clothes, iLife for the Mac, and a new LCD monitor for her Mac (which admittedly was probably more of a belated Birthday gift than a Christmas present). Meanwhile I ended up getting a new desktop computer (since the one I had pieced together after mine crashed last year has never fully recovered). Sadly my new desktop came with Vista though (and it didn't boot either, but that's a story for another post). And despite all these commercials I see where people claim to love the Vista OS I can't say I like it at all so far (although I only have the Home Pro edition, maybe the Professional version is better).