Santa Brought a Tricycle!

Yes, I know it's still 19 days until Christmas. But since we're flying out early next Saturday, we decided to have a mini-Christmas for our family today, with the presents we weren't going to pack along with us on our trip back to the US.
And the biggest of those was...Madeline's first bike! Okay, trike, but still, it was exciting. Thanks to Murphy's Law, the camcorder was inexplicably not working, so all we have are some photos, but that's better than nothing.

The tree (yes, we need to get a star for the top of it)...

The trike...

First sight...

Whee!!...

Hell's Angels, watch out?!?...

And here she is, all ready for her first ride outside. She has a lot of fun making the horn honk, and it's very, very loud. Sigh. At least we bought a trike with a parent handle, since she has yet to learn the finer points of pedaling or steering! All things with time and practice, right?

So, one final funny story about our "Christmas" day: We used Madeline's nap this afternoon to get everything ready (assemble the trike, put the presents out, etc.) since we've told her Santa brings presents while you're asleep. When she woke up, Bill was busy finishing up a project outside, so I told her we had to wait upstairs for Daddy, since Santa had come while she was sleeping. Well, she decided she did NOT want to go downstairs. Eventually I figured out it was because she thought Santa was still down there! So I told her that Santa wasn't there any more: he'd gone bye-bye, but had left the presents for her. Then she was all ready to head down the stairs and check it out. Evidently, while she's all about Santa Claus in the abstract, or in photos, or TV, she is not so sure about hanging out with him in her house, face-to-face!

A New Way to Get Clean

Yes, that is my child trying to climb into the washing machine. I have absolutely no idea what prompted her to do so, but then, she's been full of strange and unpredictable ideas lately (i.e. "Let's smear large quantities of lip balm all over the pictures in my room while Mommy's cleaning the bathrooms").

Thankfully, although she really was trying awfully hard, she's just too big to actually fit into the drum, let alone get the door shut behind her, so I was able to simply stand back, watch, snap a few photos, and have a good laugh!

Family Outing

Bill decided to take the day after Thanksgiving off, since he had one day of vacation left over, and would lose it if he didn't use it. I planned to use that weekend to get him to get all the Christmas decorations and the Christmas tree, etc. down from the area above the garage so I could decorate. He found a new and creative way to side-step "honey-do" lists: propose a family outing instead!
We drove a little over two hours to the area of Stoke-on-Trent, where there is a hotel with a water park inside it. The hotel is part of Alton Towers, which is an amusement park here in England.
Unfortunately, I have no pictures of the weekend, as photography was not allowed inside the water park, and there didn't seem much point in taking a picture just of our hotel room. Sorry!
We had a very good time, though--Madeline loves the water just as much as her daddy does, so she got to do lots of "swimming". She really has no fear at all, so we were grateful for the lifejacket-type vests they make for kids these days! The kiddie water slide in particular was a big hit. My only complaint was that they didn't have the place heated quite as much as I would have liked, so we had to stop to warm up a little too often. But it was still a fun weekend. And Bill and Madeline humored me by letting me have a few hours on the way home to stop at Spode and Wedgwood for a little browsing!
Oh, and we did still get the Christmas decorations down that weekend after we got home, so I guess Bill's little trick didn't work after all...