kcobweb

I just got back from taking my mother to the airport. I am so glad she came here this year, instead of all of us having to go there..... It seems to have worked out for everybody. Christmas was low-key here, but we all did very well. Oh, and I had a birthday in there too.... I mostly got books, movies and kitchen stuff (a microplane grater, an automated can opener, etc.) - though I did get an MP3 player for my birthday, yay!

Elena had an amazing Christmas - right on top in her stocking were a handful of matchbox cars, and I almost thought she would stop right there and not want to continue..... She also got many plastic dinosaurs, a set of alphabet blocks, a garbage truck with moving parts and beeping noises, a set of boxes that make a castle (all different rooms), little wooden people to live in the castle, a xylophone, a 6-sided puzzle, a stack of books, dinosaur pajamas, and her first band T-shirt (from my sister's boyfriend's band - E's favorite music right now is their second CD). She put the T-shirt on over her pajamas as soon as she unwrapped it, and has been wearing it steadily ever since - we only managed to remove it from her body this morning, and now it's in the laundry bag. :) Oh, and she got a stuffed Elmo (not a tickle-me version, thankfully) and that's been going everywhere with her. She had lots of little presents under the tree, and I thought we might never finish unwrapping them all. Aside from lots of gross favoritism to the Elmo and the T-shirt, she's been playing with all the rest of the new stuff pretty equally all around, so there were no great failures. A good number of her presents are cubes that easily stack into towers (the blocks, the puzzle pieces, the castle....), so there has been a plethora of tower-building.

The week with Mom was pretty good - we did a lot of baking (she did some with Elena, which was fun to watch), and now have an amazing number of cookies around (and some candy too). We usually manage to get along okay - this time was perhaps better than usual, even. All the same, I find it a little teeny bit tense-making having her around all the time, and I'm glad she's headed home.

Now, we're waiting for