Home Again

I am kind of a mean mommy. I don't take all the Christmas presents out of the box on the day the kids get them, because then they lose everything in the chaos of Christmas and they get bored with them that much quicker...

At any rate, I open a couple presents at a time over the course of about a month so that the kids can appreciate them a little at a time.

In Emerald's stocking, she got a three-game set of Jacks, Pick-Up-Sticks, and Tiddlywinks. Now, I have played Jacks before (although the only thing I remember is leaving them out on the floor for Daddy to step on in bare feet--that got me in a bit of trouble!!) but Pick Up Sticks and Tiddlywinks are new to me. So I sit down with her and I am trying to figure these games out but I am making it way more complicated than it needs to be so I am confused and getting frustrated...in the end, it turns out I just stink at these games, lol.

When I was younger, I really enjoyed marbles, because that's how cool I was. I was thinking about buying some marbles and teaching Emerald how to play when lo and behold--I found a bag of game marbles in our shed! The last tenants must have left them, but we have to be careful because marbles are such a choking hazard.

Uncle Royce got Gabriel some inflatable long balloons with a little hand pump to blow them up with; I blew up a few of them and let the kids use them as swords to fight, until Gabe started chewing on them and Emerald was shooting them all around the living room--someone was either going to choke or get a balloon to the eye, so I called a stop to it and put the balloons away.

Benjamin got a lot of toys that light up and talk in annoying high pitched voices and make music...you know, basically the toys babies just adore. Well, they are the only ones--older kids love them too. Gabe and Emerald wanted to play with Ben's toys as much as he did!

I put together Gabriel's Thomas the Train railroad set; you flip a switch and Thomas puffs along until his batteries go dead or until you flip his switch again. Gabe did not like that and wanted to manipulate the train on his own, which I am fine with, as it is hard to keep enough batteries for all their toys that require it.

It was a lot of fun to play with all these new toys together :)