Christmas and New Years Rolled Up Into One

Happy Christmas and Merry New Year!

Since Christmas was preempted by icy roads last week, we postponed it until today. At noon my mom, her boyfriend, my kids and their significant others gathered at my house. Missing from the get-together was Grandma which is a whole 'nuther story that I'll have to vent elsewhere.

I've been eagerly anticipating the kids opening their gifts, especially Ian. He has spent the better part of the last three months talking about Flight Simulator. We picked it up on Black Friday with the other Christmas gifts and downplayed the likelihood of it arriving in St. Nick's bag. He yammered on and on and on about getting this game. We discovered that he would also need a joystick and that promptly arrived via Amazon.com. After Christmas with everyone else he had a wallet loaded with cash and gift cards. He has spent nearly every waking moment of the last week surfing the web. He had three pages scribbled out of different software combinations. I flipped this into a teaching moment and introduced him to the glory of spreadsheets.

Today he announced it was the BEST CHRISTMAS EVER after he opened Flight Simulator and a new Logitech joystick. He was also enthused to open the large Santa gift to the household, a Wii system with several additional games. Unfortunately, none of the new games can be set up yet because Ian returns to his dad's house for the weekend. Mmmmm... life lessons in patience.

After gifts were opened we packed up and headed to the theater for our annual New Year's movie. We unanimously agreed a few weeks ago that our movie this year would be Sherlock Holmes. It was pretty good, but kind of long especially for the three female bladders in the party.

A gentle, but bitter, cold snow greeted us as we left the theater. Overall it was a very pleasurable day and a good start to the year.