Hobson's Choice
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Christmas Tips
My cool neighbor Heather has an excellent blog on Holiday Shopping Tips. I urge you to check them if you want to minimize your holiday-time stress.
Here are a couple tips of my own.
(1) Amazon has free shipping on all orders over $25. So if you have book lovers on your list, you can easily get things for them at considerably cheaper than store prices. And as time has gone on, more and more non-book/cd/dvd items have qualified for "Super Saver Shipping." For example, just last week I got... whoops! Chris will be reading this blog, so I'd better hush.
(2) Wooden spoons. You get them 3 for a $1. You cover the spoon bowl with plastic wrap. You set your child up with some acrylic paints (and a smock!). When they're done, you swipe a coat of varnish on their art. Perfect present for grandparents. And children as young as age two can do this.
(3) Since I was about 20 years old, I've been trying to get all my non-electronic Christmas shopping done before Thanksgiving. When I can pull it off (and that's been rare), I can savor the joys of December. We can make cookies, listen to albums, enjoy our lights, check out Charlie Brown. I rarely have to say no to holiday parties because the shopping's already done. I find that I can remember the simple gifts of the season when there is time to do so.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Enjoy Your Spoon Painting!
6:50 p.m. - 2006-11-29
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The World is Too Much with Us
So maybe there was something to all those great 19th century writers who liked to go on and on and on about idyllic childhoods, innocence, and the general superiority of children -- I'm looking at you, Mr. Wordsworth. To illustrate, I give you two tales of snoring.
(1)When I was a kid, we had a visiting minister stay with us, and he slept in my brother Craig's room. In the middle of the night, Craig ran into Mom and Dad's bed, terrified. "There's a bear in my room," he cried. I believe this minister still tells the story about his own horrific snoring to this day; he's semi-famous, and I was channel surfing on the radio one day a couple of years ago. What should I hear but the snoring bear story?
(2) On Thanksgiving night, I heard my father's snoring when I got up in the night to pee (we are a family who wanders around in the night). My first sleepy thought before I realized what the noise was? Oh my god, something's wrong with one of the vaporizers; I'd better unplug it before it explodes.
Well, which is the more thrilling and romantic vision? Bears or Vaporizer trouble? It kind of makes you long for childhood.
4:45 p.m. - 2006-11-29
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Sandi Kahn Shelton
Can I tell you how happy I am that Sandi Kahn Shelton now has a blog? She's my favorite parenting author, and I like her novels, too. She used to write a column in Working Mother, but she hasn't for a while now. For the past couple of years, I would periodically troll the internet to see if she had any kind of web presence and now she does.
When Eleanor was a baby and would only take naps in the car, I would drive around Lexington and then settle into the driveway with one of SKS's books and try to giggle myself senseless without making a sound. She taught me that it's good to be funny about families and having them, that you can be hilarious about your life without either being bitter on the one hand or cutesy on the other. She taught me that you can be big-hearted in your writing while also noticing all the absurd things go on in families.
If you haven't read any of her books, check out:
Sleeping Through the Night and Other Lies
Preschool Confidential
You Might As Well Laugh
What Comes After Crazy
I've just started reading her new novel A Piece of Normal.
I don't think my blog would be here if it weren't for her writing and what it's taught me. So check her out:
Sandi Kahn Shelton's Blog
4:37 p.m. - 2006-11-29
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All I want...
What, you might ask, did E and her best friend down the street have their first ever all-out, crying, yelling, door-slamming fight about? What object made them go all Gollum and start whispering, "My precious, my precious"?
An empty paper towel tube, of course.
So call up Santa Claus, ladies and gentlemen. Have him take back the fancy toys he's undoubtedly got for them. Because these children want a paper tube more than anything on Earth?
4:34 p.m. - 2006-11-29
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