Well, it finally arrived: Christmas! Unfortunately, Tom and I had stayed up so late the evening before, wrapping presents, that we had a slow start to the morning's festivities. When did this happen? When did I officially enter Grownup Land? As a kid, I practically leaped from my bed, glowing, at 6:01am on the dot on Christmas morning, no matter how late I stayed up the previous night. But, I digress...
Once we had shaken the sleepiness from our brains and started the coffee, we got into the spirit of things. The Baby Bee is still too young to really understand why her new living room tree with shiny stuff all over it was suddenly babysitting a passel of green and red packages, but she was definitely curious about the new additions. After cautiously poking around, she looked at our goofy grins and decided that her parents were certifiably crazy. We crooned at her and encouraged her to open one of the presents, but she wanted nothing to do these paper-covered lumps. However, after the first present was unwrapped, the wheels clicked in her head and suddenly she was chanting, "More? More?"
With our help, Emma eventually tore through all her gifts, oohing and aahing over each item, but was clearly stymied as to why she was getting all this "stuff" when she had perfectly good "stuff" in her room. However, all bets were off when she came to the
pièce de résistance, the new baby doll. After meticulously ripping the bottom half of the wrapping paper off the box, she spied two little legs and a white diaper, which in the Baby Bee universe equals a baby doll. With an ultrasonic shriek that sent the cats running for cover, she screamed "Babeeeeee! Babeeeee!" over and over again, until we got the baby out of the box. Emma's panicked ululating increased with every passing second, as if the baby doll was trapped in a burning building and her life depended on us snipping every cursed and confounded wire tie and plastic restraint with our clumsy adult fingers. Finally, we freed the doll and Emma suddenly entered a trance-like state in which she quietly cradled her new baby and stared serenely out the window for the next 15 minutes. If ONLY we had had a video camera! She proceeded to hover anxiously over the doll for the rest of the morning, looking for all the world like an almost three-foot tall mother hen monitoring her eggs. Secure in the knowledge that we would competently supervise her new baby, Emma spared a few seconds away to collect her other dolls and set up her new nursery in the living room.
After much playing, eating, reading and lounging, Emma's Mom and Dad settled that night for a long winter's nap, happy but ready for the holiday to come to a close and looking forward to the 365-day interval until the next one :).
