Head Tale

I haven’t blogged for a few days as I got overwhelmed and busy with that “real life” thing as Shea’s folks and mine joined us from the 27th until the 29th to have a belated Christmas together.  Here are a few numbers from the past week…

0 – number of times I’ve left the house to go to a store (since a Christmas Eve Day run to the grocery store).  No Boxing Day shopping.  No quick runs to various other stores that everybody else was making for extra groceries or wall-mounts for TVs or various other needs.

1 – number of times I left the house to go tobogganing with Pace (and 3 is how many days later my arms and legs are still sore from overdoing it!)

3 – number of realistic toy guns Pace got for Christmas (four if you could the Nerf gun that shoots foam discs).  Letting your kids play with guns is a pretty controversial topic in parenting circles but Shea and I are much more on the “it’s not the toy that’s the problem; it’s other factors that make kids violent.”

There is nothing inherently good or bad about kids playing with toy guns,” said Daniel Stauber, who specializes in treating children and adolescents at Community Psychological Consultants in Indianapolis. “It all depends on the child.”

5 – “too big to take with us” baby toys we got from Shea’s cousin who was moving to New Zealand that ended up turning into “Santa” gifts for Sasha.  (The irony that these Santa gifts actually came from *not* being able to travel halfway around the world wasn’t lost on me.)

10 – years I’ve been waiting to have a turducken for a major holiday meal, a desire that *finally* got realised this year.  (Verdict: it’s not something I’d have every year but definitely interesting to try once.)  Perhaps the major value of serving turducken is the discussion it led to about what other animals could be stuffed into one another and Shea’s hilarious quip that a pig stuffed into a cow could be called “BePorkin'”.

12 – years old was the age of the bottle of Glenlivet I got from my in-laws (and 15 and 18 years for the two airplane-sized bottles that came as part of the gift set)

25 – number of consecutive words Pace acted out in a game of Charades with his grandparents (I’m sure none of them minded him being the main actor in the game!)

150+ – number of playable characters in Pace’s new Lego Marvel Superheroes game.  Dad’s pretty excited about that but Pace is more into his new Skylanders Swap Force pack which, luckily, was picked up by Santa at Costco a week before Christmas at Costco as a last minute decision to get Pace the final item on his gift list (er, not counting “two front teeth” – maybe if his dad was dentist, we could’ve fulfilled that wish!)