i learned an excellent christmas-morning sleep-extending trick from my parents: there will be no present-opening until parents are awake. however, stockings are fair game. place stockings somewhere in between the childrens’ bedrooms and the parents’ bedroom, and voila! you’ve gotten at least an extra hour of sleep as the children plow their way through junky little toys, books, stickers, temporary tattoos and candy. i believe this loophole to the “no presents til mommy and daddy are on their feet and full of coffee” was instituted around about the year that my sister and i, instead of going to sleep christmas eve, stayed awake until midnight, at which point it was technically christmas morning, right? in fact, we waited until 12:30 just to be sure, then went to argue our case at the foot of the parental bed (and immediately got shot down with some version of “because i said so.”)
most of the junk toys fell in the “disgusting” category, most notably a bunch of madballs (eg is squishing out a sac full of bloody and realistic eyeballs, and was thrilled to evoke genuine retching with it) and boogaz – a big plastic nose, full of “slime” (the kind that doesn’t wash out of clothes) and a sticky booger-warrior, which, when tossed on a ceiling, sticks hard for days and makes your little brother fall over every time he walks past it because he HAS to look up at it and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can he slow down even a little bit because GODDAMMIT HE’S DOING IMPORTANT THINGS.
then there was a christmas breakfast of pancakes:
the “yay for MEEEEEE!” pose brought to you by the now well-fed dogs catching everything MonkeyBeef threw at them… yeah, they know where to hang out. under the short and screechy one.
and then it was back to holding court from the lofty tableau of his holy train table.
and then… it was time for the boardgames. this christmas was DEFINITELY all about the boardgames. some bakugan, some fencing equipment, and some BOARDGAMES. blokus (holy CRAP do we all love that game; prm and i are almost as addicted to that as we were to tetris 20 years ago), newton’s apples, connect four, life, sorry sliders, super scrabble (the board is twice as large for the super-competitive word geeks) scrabble express (the board is tiny and the game lasts twenty minutes, for the people who, for unfathomable reasons, persist in dragging their feet through the baby steps of assimilation into scrabbling… *cough* CheeseSteak *hack* is a vag *cough* *COUGH.*)
then there was some coloring… or, at least, some almost-purposeful-looking handling of the coloring implements:
and their first-ever 3-D movie (followed by numerous not-quite-successful attempts at drawing their own 3-D artwork):
and finally “i’m just going to close my eyes for 10 minutes,” which is what PRM likes to call his two-hour naps:
up next: Rats & Rice Revisited (subtitled: You Can Go Home Again, So Long As You Have $2.30.)
