Some leftovers from Christmas

Sorry for leaving Buster up there so long. People have advised me it's pretty depressing to come back and see him each time. I think we're through the mourning period, so it's ok to move on.

I think we all have this lingering sense of how great Christmas was when we were kids. You lose it through high school and college and your twenties, and it's a little depressing. Now that I have two little kids, I'm staring to understand why it was so great, and I'm confident it had nothing to do with Jesus. Michael is at an age where everything is simple and fascinating. It's therapeutic to spend so much time with someone like that. There's something simple and pure about Christmas that appeals to children... presents, Christmas lights, a train around the Christmas tree. A few very simple observations from our holidays:

Michael's pretty sure everything on the earth belongs to him. Both my boys got big huge tonka trucks at my in-laws house. The next morning Michael woke up and was playing with Matthew's truck, so we told him he needed to give it to Matthew. He responded by saying, 'It's my Matthew's truck.' Pretty impressive, not yet three... already re-defining the rules of grammar. Maybe you'd call it a 'double possessive.'

We're driving home from my parents in Wisconsin, and we're in Charleston, WV driving over a bridge. It's like 11:30 at night, so he should be asleep, but he's wide awake, and he says, 'Mommy, we're going over a bridge!' He was pretty excited about the tunnels in WV as well. I wish I could get that excited about going over a bridge or through a tunnel.

Whenever we opened presents, Matthew would open one and be content playing with the paper for the rest of the day. Not so much with Michael. My brother-in-law's family has this tradition of playing bingo Christmas day. Everybody brings a bunch of extra presents that you lay out on a table and when you win a round of bingo you grab a present. Then we open them all at the end. I cleaned up this year. Michael helped me open my presents because he seemingly can't open enough presents, even though he gets that they're daddy's presents and nothing he can really play with. I was amazed and slightly frustrated at how quickly he could tear through a present and then, without even looking at it, ask for the next one so he could open it. Maybe that's why Eve took the bite out of the apple, because no matter how well things are going in our lives, there's something in us that always thinks what's under the paper will make our lives better than they are now. Or maybe something's in us that thinks what's under the paper will make our lives better because Eve took that bite out of the apple. Whatever the case it made me think part of that simplicity factor has already disappeared in Michael.