Well, no, that’s not really fair. Both of the kids got plenty of toys, sure, but they also got new clothes and numerous books and stockings full of candy (turns out that the little girl is bonkers about candy canes; peppermint leaves me cold, pun semi-intended, but she was snatching them off the Christmas tree every chance she got) and so forth, but the toys get almost all the focus. And that includes the parental focus, because of course the real trick of having more than one kid at Christmas is managing the highly combustible combination of shiny new playthings and general overstimulation and highly developed senses of possessive ownership and baseline sibling rivalry and disparity in developmental maturity. Honestly, the kids were pretty good, all told, even given that the little girl was of course fascinated by many of the toys the little guy received, while at the same time the little guy was pretty intrigued by a few of the toys the little girl received. So there was some mutual stealing back and forth, and somehow it all balanced out. And to his credit, the vast majority of the time the little guy continues to understand that we expect more from him than from his sister, given their respective ages, and he plays nice with her and lets her take her turns first and is sweet as shoo-fly pie. The majority of the time.
Between the illness taking the wind out of my sails and my wife’s in turn, and the resulting cancellation of various get-togethers, plus the cold and wet weather and the closure of school/daycare for the holidays, the little guy did go a bit (understandably) stir crazy. Unfortunately this resulted in him trying his mighty little darnedest to provoke his mother and myself, and that in turn caused him to temporarily lose his big Santa-present, an oversize talking Lightning McQueen Hawk. This happened on about the 27th, and for a while it looked like the little guy was going to be deprived of the toy for many more days than the two he had been allowed to play with it before having it confiscated. But after a couple days the little guy calmed down/got back to normal, and his Lightning McQueen Hawk privileges were restored. So it goes.
Also during all that downtime, my wife and I both read a lot of books to both children. A whole LOT of books, old and new. And, again, I’m glad that my children are drawn to the written word, I know beyond any doubt that growing up well-read will serve them well all their lives, so I can’t complain. And yet. The books are getting longer and denser, especially in the little guy’s case. It takes more time to read them, and increasingly it takes more energy to keep big brother and little sister from disrupting each other’s reading experience; if one of them is on my lap, the other one wants to be there too, but if I’m reading one of the little guy’s books the little girl tends to want to the pages turned more quickly and constantly threatens to rip them out, whereas when it’s one of her board books being read the little guy tends to steamroll right over any effort I make to get her to point at things or repeat words or whathaveyou. So that is fun!
The little guy is still very much into kid-friendly science books, too. My Little Bro was kind enough to give him a book of 101 facts about the ocean as a Christmas gift, which we are still working our way through. But that has recently been eclipsed (as it were) by yet another National Geographic Kids book, which was not a present but rather a reward for more recent good behavior. The newest tome is all about outer space, and even I find myself geeked out and impressed with it as it is recent enough to reflect Pluto’s reclassification as a dwarf planet and also the existence of other dwarfs in our solar system (Ceres, Eris, Haumea and Makemake). The little guy prefers the gas giants, so much so that he has taken to inventing his own supermassive planets and then recounting their profiles (in the style of the book) aloud to his mother and me, including their names, positions from the sun, relative sizes and number of moons. It gets to be a little exhausting after the third or fourth imaginary planet he dreams up, trying to keep all the details straight, but he gets so excited about them that it’s hard to begrudge him. And any behavior incentive that works around bathtime and bedtime (such as a promise to pore over not one but two planet chapters in the new book) is nothing to be dismissed lightly.
Anyway, that was Christmas, or perhaps that is Christmas so far as we still have yet to reschedule a post-plague get-together and (one-way) gift exchange with my father’s family that will probably at this point need to wait until mid-January. It may very well be for the best that things end up spread out that way. Our children continue to be fairly spoiled, in all the positive and negative connotations of the term. For them, it’s a net win; for my wife and me, sometimes it makes our lives easier that they have so much to occupy themselves with while we catch our collective breath, and sometimes it merely creates situations in which we must intervene and referee. We did manage to put some of the older, baby-ish toys away for the moment, to make room for the latest haul. But of course there will be a baby potentially interested in playing with those same toys in a few short months. And next Christmas we’ll have two kids and one baby, and the Christmas after that we will have three kids, at which point we are probably going to have to move to a bigger house with a playroom approximately the size of a Wal-Mart.
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