Did I mention I hate winter? I must have thin blood or something because I can't STAND being cold and am cold all the time in the winter. Forget going outside basically ever, which I'm sure doesn't do anything for the flat feeling that starts in about October and lasts pretty much until daylight savings time is over (or does it start in the Spring?)
Total sidebar--I don't understand why it is grammatically correct to end a sentence with the punctuation inside a parenthesis. It just seems wrong to me.
Anyway, I hate winter and pretty much also hate Christmas. Granted, the actual DAY of Christmas was fun--we had two extra kids this year, Patrick's neice and nephew (or, as the niece lamented to Mimi at Hebrew school "You're so lucky to have Patrick as a step-dad--he used to be my uncle"); apparently she thinks that because he's no longer married to her blood aunt he's not her uncle anymore, which couldn't be further from the truth. (and, illustrating my point about the parenthesis, was that semi-colon supposed to be inside the parenthesis or not?)
(I do understand, however, that when a whole sentence is inside parenthesis it makes sense to also have the end punctuation inside.)
Sorry...so anyway, we had the four kids and Patrick's "ex" brother- and sister-in-law, who, again, are still as close to him as ever despite his divorce. It was an interesting dynamic because both my kids and the niece and nephew are Jewish; the niece and nephew have traditionally stayed at Patrick's house on Christmas Eve so Santa can consider them temporary Christians worthy of receiving gifts. They totally believe in Santa so I had to put the fear of god into my jaded kids not to spoil it for them by letting on that Santa is not, in fact, real. The kids spent the evening of the 24th glued to the computer monitoring the "Santa tracker" to keep tabs on where he was in relation to our house.
Christmas morning was a jumble of a million presents--it took a full hour for us all to open the ridiculous number of gifts under the tree--and a fun breakfast with the sort of in-laws. Then they left and it was time for the grand finale gift for our kids. This concept was totally initiated by Patrick, as I am usually too pragmatic to give into the big ticket item as gift for children; left to my own devices I would never have gotten an iPod for a 12 year old. But Patrick wanted to get them something special so I relented and we got Mimi and iPod (is that how you spell it?) and Matthew a PSP. We did a treasure hunt (again, Patrick's idea but it was really fun) with clues first directing them to an iTunes gift card for Mimi and PSP games for Matthew, then instructing them to open the gifts and check under the Christmas tree for the actual gift that went with the card and the games.
They found the first gifts and had to report back to the living room to open them. Matthew opened his first and literally SCREAMED "I GOT A PSP!!!!" jumping up and down. Then Mimi opened her gift card, assuming it was from a store, and when she saw it was for iTunes, even unflappable she started hyperventilating. Then they went and got the "real" gifts and Matthew opened his first with another SCREAM, this time "HOLY CRAP!!!" (yes, bad mom points for me for not taking the thing away from him and punishing him for swearing; hey, he could have said "holy sh*t" and didn't.) Mimi opened hers and was, by Mimi standards (e.g. the excitability of Wednesday Adams), estatic.
In case my description didn't accurately convey Matthew's excitement, maybe this will:
I just realized your eyes are probably bleeding from reading this much; I'll leave you with a few pictures of my Christmas decor:
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