Post-Holiday Ditty

Way over due for a new post, don't you agree?

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Mazaltov!

Always on the other side of the holidays, looking back on them, I'm reminded of just where those holiday blues come from. They're not SO bad this year, though, now that I'm learning to embrace my nuclear family more tightly and focus on them rather than the parents and All That Is Going Wrong with them.

Having a child has really made a difference around the holidays. Everything is so much more celabratory than it has been in... well, in forever. Sure we celebrated Christmas when I was little. I know we had a tree almost every year, and I do recall getting those incredible gifts here and there throughout: One year, plastic and realistic Breyer horses to play with, another year my new 'Big Girl' bike, with the sparkling pink banana seat and tassles in the handles to show just HOW much wind you were creating all on your own, and still another year, roller skates. The kind that you adjust with a key and fit over your sneakers, clamping them down and praying that they hold...

My six-year-old is, I know, making the inevitable change from 'What I would like for Christmas is that cool attack robot action-figure that Daniel has at school...' to things that have actual thought behind him, after cultivating his opinion over weeks of info-toxin from the television coupled with the Toys 'R' Expensive catalog. Before long we will be heading to Circuit City every time, to spend the majority of cash on something electronic for him, I can just FEEL its slow and inevitable approach.

But this year, he made the sensible selection of a couple of sets of Magnetix. He also got the HUGE honking set that comes in a case. Now you might think, well sure, magnetic balls and sticks are sort of interesting, for the first thirty minutes or so, but what about after that?

I am proud to say- mainly because I believe it shows an early propensity for engineering skills- that he plays with them for LOOOOOONG stretches of time, not to mention the smaller set in the backseat that he grooves on every time we're driving somewhere that takes longer than ten minutes to reach. Yes, the Magnetix were a big hit. They're pretty damned cool for adult play as well.

Of course, this was delicately balanced with the new 'Ed, Edd and Eddie' video game, which features a multitude of mindless tasks and the grappling of bigger Ed and using his head as a battering ram to destroy neighbor's homes and to cull evil red squirrels that will hump your leg harder than a Re-dead.

Well, I don't want him to grow up in a social bubble, you know. He's gonna have to know how to PLAY with other boys, after all, even while he's on his way to MIT.