Hey Santa!

I don't know when it happened, or how, or why, but somewhere on the space-time continuum, Christmas Day turned into the longest day of the entire year. I can't blame it all on parenthood, either, because I remember feeling likewise in previous years, before Shae came along. But in any event, I still don't like getting up at the asscrack of dawn, not even for a glimpse of one of Shae's early-morning Eraserhead-style hairdos.

(Although you have to admit, that hair is pretty cracktacular.)

As was previously reported, Santa came through and gave Shae her one and only Christmas wish, a new camera. We saved that gift for last, and it went about as well as I had hoped it would.

(Key Quote: "My batteries!")

It's not a bad little camera, really. I mean, it's not 10 googlepictures or whatever the hell my camera is, but do we really need it to be? At the last minute I had some reservations about this particular model, after reading some online reviews, but then I remembered: Shae is 2½. She still thinks "guess what? chicken butt!" is funny. And the statistical likelihood that she's ever going to actually look at these pictures is pretty low. All I want out of any toy is for my kid to enjoy it, and for it to not break after 10 minutes of use. So far, so good -- and the pictures are at least as good as your average cellphone.

Well, some of them are, anyway. Shae took over 200 pictures today (wonder where she learned that?) and I edited the collection down to 62. A lot of the shots were of walls, random hands, unidentifiable heads, and general nothingness. About half of the pictures left are of guys named Joe: either my Uncle Joe -- Shae calls him Uncle Quack -- or of one or the other of my brothers-in-law. She threatened to take pictures of me, but so far she hasn't been able to catch me in the act of much of anything, although we did get the following cute exchange:

But that was totally serendipitous. She wasn't much interested in taking pictures of me, anyway, because I am a big gigantic bore. Most of the day was spent eating, unwrapping presents, eating some more, laughing, avoiding naptime, eating yet again, and just generally having a silly old good time.

All in all, I have to say, it was a pretty good Christmas. But next year I'm locking her in her room until at least 8:00.