Christmas II (12/1)
She was truly introduced to Christmas last year.  Now she's a savvy Christmas vet.  Sadly, it'll be tough-- no, impossible-- to match the impact of last year's haul.

Disney interrupted her train focus.  She still plays trains, but she's added other interests: playing farmer, shopping (cash transactions for virtually anything), characters, etc.  She's definitely a lot more well-rounded than she was earlier in the year.

Model Trains
But she's asked several times for an electric train set.  This weekend (12/2), we took two little trips: to the Ellicott City, MD B&O Museum for a Christmas train display (fun but smaller than we had expected-- fortunately the town was cute), and to Fairfax Station for a general model train display (and Santa).   On the way back from Fairfax, she was positively bubbling with ideas for me "building" electric engines and coaches and tracks, and getting a table and putting farm characters in the middle so the train could go past chickens.

Fortunately, she's pretty fixed on only one thing: Gordon the tender engine.  Anything else is gravy.

White Christmas (12/20)

It snowed a couple of inches on the 19th, so it'll be a whitish Christmas (snow on the ground).  It is purely academic, however, as we'll be in Florida.

Letter to Santa
Dang.  I've gotta remember to put her Santa letter in here.

The Main Event

We flew down to Florida, which tries to feel Christmassy with it's myriad lawn decorations, but doesn't quite pull it off.  The night before Christmas, we all went for a walk and when we came back, we surprises Santa, who presumably thought we were in bed and started filling stockings.  He dropped a few teasers, but came back later with the bounty.

Maddie got a ton of things, including Grandma's home-knitted Thomas mittens and hat, a train blanket, various Thomas paraphenalia, puzzles, magnetic letters, and the big winner, Thomas software.  A week later, she wears the hat and mittens daily, uses the blanket every night, loves to play with the letters (spelling names and creating nonsense words for Daddy to pronounce), and adores the software.  The software is, in fact, far better than I thought-- not necessarily in quality (although that seems fine), but in how she deals with it.  She asks nicely but doesn't whine, plays very self-sufficiently, and has been cheerfully compliant when I ask her to turn it off.

On returning to Virginia, she got the one item she really craved, Gordon, and a couple more engines.  She also got a remote control car and some math software.  Her other grandparents gave her a big kitchen and a cash register, and she loves those, too.  The cash register seems to have her interested in adding numbers-- something she previously seemed indifferent to.





a special supplement to maddie's diary

activities
     - opening advent calendars
      - christmas stories, shows
      - train displays
      - parties
      - trip to Florida
maddie diary   christmas 2000