Despite My Best Intentions...

In retrospect, I may have been a little too Hallmark-sappy on the last post. Blame some sort of intoxication via Christmas carol overdose.

Regardless of my lovely, if sappy, intentions, things never seem to turn out exactly as one might imagine or hope they will.

Christmas Eve with the in-laws went pretty well. Perhaps because I had what amounted to a Cabernet IV drip as I sipped wine throughout the festivities.

Xmas morning got off to a nifty start, despite our 6-year-old daughter waking us at 5 AM by knocking on our bedroom door and to make sure she hadn't "slept through" Christmas. (My fault for encouraging her to watch 3 different versions of "A Christmas Carol" in the past couple weeks.)

But my zen calm began to wane during the two-hour toy liberation that followed the actual gift unwrapping. You know what I am referring to if you have had to remove any form of doll from its packaging in the past few years...

The award for the most-labor-intensive toy packaging has to go to Mattel.

I don't know what exactly Fairytopia Barbies have been up to in Fairyland (or Marketing-ploy-land or wherever they reside) but evidently they have earned some sort of punishment for their past indiscretions -- in the form of the little plastic tethers (three of them, no less!) shot through the back of their heads to secure them to the cardboard packaging. (Imagine smaller versions of the plastic things used to secure price tags to clothing.) That is in addition to the myriad of wires and threads holding down the dolls arms and legs in a manner that suggests that the doll should be wearing bondage gear instead of a glittery gauze skirt.

I had to deal with not one, but two of these little submissives, as well as a couple of the creatures known as "Sky Dancers" (but I like to think of them as "the toys my kids shoot off too close to me and give me brush burns with") pixel chix, trollz, bratz, and various other toys with names ending in "z" instead of "s."

By the time their toys were freed, it was pretty much time for us to leave for my parents' house. A lovely hour-and-a-half drive through pouring rain.

Once there, we were treated to an evening watching 7 children running in circles while brandishing wooden croquet mallets from the set that my mother had misguidedly given to my 3-year-old nephew. Oh yeah, because there were not enough mallets to go around, there were also plastic swords being waved about, as well as various toy guns left over from the pre-PC days of my childhood.

Oh, there were certainly some high points:

One of my cousins looked particularly pretty -- and after she left, we realized it was because this was the first time in years we have seen her without her head shaved.

My 60-ish aunt telling my sister and me about how she visits our myspace pages regularly, checks out our "friends" (she knew more about these so-called friends than I do) and ended by regaling us with the cautionary tale of a woman killed by a myspace stalker.

My uncle placed something in the palm of my hand that he said was a piece of "magic mushroom." I quickly handed it back to him -- I have enough hallucinations on my own, thank you. Besides, knowing him, it was probably just shiitake.

We stayed overnight at my parents' house, and had a lovely time with them on December 26th. Ignoring the three times my 9-year-old threw up in their toilet after she woke up with a migraine, a good time was had by all.

Back home now, with a busy week ahead. In fact, right now I've got a pressing engagement in the other room - a date with Shark Boy & Lava Girl (in 3-D!)

Life is good. God bless us, everyone.