Daddy: Siena, you need to sleep well tonight because we have a lot of presents to open tomorrow. Are you looking forward to opening presents?

Siena: I’m looking forward to opening a doll.

D: I can’t guarantee that you’ll get a doll, so you need to be prepared to not get a doll. But you will get lots of stuff from people who love you very much.

S: If I don’t get a doll, I’ll like whatever I get.

Siena also was a “rock star” (to quote Mama) at the Christmas Eve party. She was a little shy at first, but she warmed up to the crowd, never had a meltdown, was very gracious in opening gifts and saying thank you, and was very polite to everyone. She certainly held up better than I did!

(Thalia had a rough day overall; a few hours of screaming in the morning, and then again during the car ride home. She’s still working through an ear infection and a cold, along with a recurring fever.)

Mama worked on Saturday, so I was home with the kids. We went to music class, bought some cider donuts afterwards, and then had lunch. Siena’s lunch was ruined, as you might expect, by the aforementioned donuts even though she’d only had one of them by that point. Siena also enjoyed some time warming her feet on our dog:

In the afternoon we went to a Border bookstore, ostensibly to buy a “new Christmas book” (according to Siena). The girls both fell asleep in the car on the way there (all of a ten-minute drive), so I drove around a while and eventually parked and rested myself for a bit. Around 4:15 I woke up Siena and in we went. She ended up buying a small Christmas polar-bear beanie baby doll and no books, but that’s OK since the bear was cheaper than any book and she was happy.

On the way home, I got a craving for Indian food, so once mama got home I ran out to get some of that. Unfortunately, Siena didn’t like any of it, not even the chicken tikka masala that she has enjoyed in the past. She threw a fit, and that coupled with some earlier issues like not wanting to stop watching some videos (Sesame Street) when it was time for dinner, resulted in her being sent to bed. I gave her a bath, but she got no books or really any bed-time snuggling. She wasn’t happy but then again neither were we. This was just about the first time that she had been as bad as she was, so I guess we are right in the thick of it now with her terrible-three’s.

Unfortunately Thalia had napped entirely through the Borders run (not a run for the border, as it were), and whether due to that or some other cause, she slept fitfully during the night and mama and I got up four or five times to calm her back down. So Sunday did not start so well. Oh and we had about four inches of snow overnight. Ugh!

However, a great benefit of having a three-year old is that you end up enjoying the snow weather even if you aren’t a fan of snow simply because she enjoys it so much. I bundled up and went outside with Siena and helped her eat a lot of snow:

In addition to the snow-eating, Siena wanted to get a stick and beat trees with it to make them drop the snow stuck on their branches. This is an idea she got from Ezra Keat’s Snowy Day. This worked quite well but was not as much fun as eating snow. She also tried to make a snow angel and a snowman, but there just wasn’t enough snow to do either properly.

After that, mama assembled the Exersaucer, which Siena had when she was a wee lass and is now being passed on to Thalia. Turns out, Thalia loved it!

(I seem to have a habit of cutting off the tops of their heads in the photos, whoops.)

We also went out and bought a Christmas tree, and got it set up and decorated. Siena wanted it to be “sparkly,” which I thought referred to the lights. However, she said, “the lights are sparkles.” So then I thought maybe she meant the ornaments, but she said those weren’t sparkles, either. Fearing a sparkle-free tree, I was relieved when Siena exclaimed after the lights were all placed and illuminated, “Sparkly!”

Siena and I went grocery shopping while mama and Thalia had a snooze. Then mama made some mac n’ cheese for dinner, which was much better received than the Indian food the prior night. However, Siena still had some tantrum issues (in the end, three times in two days).

After Siena went to bed, the final interesting event of the weekend was that we got Thalia to have her first real giggling while I was playing with her on the bed. An actual, “heh heh” laugh with a big smile as I was playing a little peekaboo with her. A great way to end an active weekend!

Click on the picture to see full size.