Anticipation

LO is starting to anticipate holidays and birthdays this year.  I don't know if the special meals or the gifts are the bigger draw.  I think Christmas and Santa have gotten talked up quite a bit at school.  Not to be a grinch, but I'm afraid the gifts have been heavily emphasized there.  In any case, LO is pretty excited.  It is really fun to hear him singing Christmas carols (Rudolph and Jingle Bells are favorites) and telling people "Happy Merry Christmas!" I had hoped to make some sort of advent calendar, but didn't manage to get it done until December 13th, so it's more of a 12 days of Christmas.

  I had planned to cut out the tree, but my little artist put his darling handprints on the periphery and I couldn't cut them off.  He adds an ornament nightly with Da, then they count the remaining circles to know how many days are left until Christmas. 

Christmas music, decorating the tree, counting down the days, these are all ways I remember anticipating Christmas as a child.  It shouldn't have been a surprise to me that a boy might enjoy the season differently.  Still, LO's most unexpected Christmas pleasure has been the increased frequency of delivery trucks stopping at our house and passing through the neighborhood.  In the last two weeks we have sometimes had two FedEx trucks, UPS, and two mailmen!  LO has missed several naps because the trucks have stopped or passed by just as he was almost asleep.  Up he has popped to watch from his bedroom window.  How can a boy sleep when UPS is right outside his house?! 

As I started wrapping gifts this week, I saved the many Amazon boxes thinking LO might enjoy building with them and knocking them down.  I even thought we might make a city of boxes for his garbage truck.  Those were ok ideas, but it turns out that LO preferred to play "delivery man." He carried various packages from sunroom to dining room and tossed them at the "houses" of his play friends.  Now that I think of it, this is really a modern gift buying phenomenon that comes along with online shopping.  I wonder if LO will have fond memories of the UPS truck at Christmas time the way some of us remember the ice cream truck in the summers or our youth.