Riley and Avery

[Fresh out of the bathtub, hanging their stockings.]

[Preparing treats for Santa (candy cane cookies and chocolate rice milk) and the reindeer (oatmeal, celery, and a carrot)]

[Avery admiring her tube of My Little Ponies]

[Avery was pretty happy with her stocking and probably could have gone without presents.]

[The (empty) stockings that I made the girls this year. I'm not making any more any year soon, that's for sure. The girls picked out their fabrics on their own.]

[Just a cute Avery picture! By the way, Mom, that's a scratch beside Avery's nose, courtesy of Riley, not dirt!]

[The Naked Girls playing with their new toys. Riley's wearing her Huggalugs on her arms. She loves them. She had the "pirate" ones on her legs, but took them off because she was sweating.]

[Riley contemplating her next culinary creation!]

[When it comes to present un-wrapping, Avery turned pro sometime between her birthday and Christmas. She was so involved in unwrapping that she would forget to look at the gift.]

Christmas Eve sucked. It just totally sucked. I hadn't finished the girls' stockings, so I let them take a later nap than normal so I could work on them and then they wouldn't go to sleep at night. I finally got them down at 11 pm, and Avery kept waking up every 20 minutes or so and wouldn't let me go. Then I finally got her to sleep soundly around 1 or 2am and Riley woke up and wouldn't go back to sleep until around 5 am. All I got were little snatches of sleep. I think I could fall over and slip into a lovely coma. At least they both slept for about 45 minutes to start with so I got to put the presents under the tree and stuff the stockings before they interrupted me. One really annoying conversations I had with Riley as she was struggling to sleep so that Santa could come last night went like this:
Riley: Am I asleep yet?
Me: No.
Riley: Well, I was and you just woke me up by talking!
ARGH! And in my acute mental fog, I fell for this about a dozen infuriating times.

Riley and Avery really made out this year. Sometimes you don't realize that you've gone overboard until you see all the presents crowded under the tree. Luckily we have a sparse tree and not all that many branches to get in the way. The treehouse we got the girls is really huge and really well made, standing taller than Riley. Both girls love working the pulleys, but already fight over the large bucket so that they can move the people from one level to another via bucket. Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Allan got them a Ryan's Room Fairyland Forest and the girls love the bright colors and all the fairies. Pulleys must be the thing, because this one has one that goes around the set with fairy chairs hanging from it. Riley whips it around like an amusement park ride. Poor fairies. Of course, we had to get Riley a Littlest Pet Shop playset and Avery a My Little Pony playset. The girls got fairy and princess cookbooks from Auntie Mina, Uncle Brendan and the boys. I thought they would have a stroke when they saw all the colorful treats they can make. When we next have money I'll take them shopping for ingredients. I always feel crass when talking about what I got, so I'll pass on that...

I also got Riley some quality books. She's been choosing really annoying books lately. In fact, I returned her Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand back to Barnes and Noble because I found it nauseatingly written. I simply couldn't read it. The characters were one-dimensional and the plot was unfocused, and oh my goodness, the dialog was unreadable. We're working on Mr. Popper's Penguins now and find that much more enjoyable. Perhaps I should have taught her to persevere, but I also want her to develop discriminating taste when it comes to books. It always baffled me when Rudi would finish a 800 page book, and when I asked him how it was, he's say it sucked. Then why finish reading it? Or like the time I watched Scent of a Woman, and found it so horrible that I physically got sick to my stomach, and yet I kept watching it to see if it got better, and it never did. I guess that's when I learned not to waste my life on sub-standard movies and books. Anyway, for Christmas she received a beautifully illustrated collection of Aesop's fables and The Water Hole by Graeme Base.

Riley definitely has enough toys, so I'm focusing on art and craft supplies for her birthday. What she really needs is an art cabinet to organize all of her supplies and store her finished art. Right now her art is taking up all of the under-cabinet space in our kitchen. I've got a bunch of stuff picked out from Discount School Supply online, so hopefully Rudi's unemployment will go through and we'll have money to buy her stuff. As it is, if we pay the absolute bare minimum on our bills, we'll have about $250 left over for food/gas/etc for the entire month. Which means a lot of going no where and a lot of ramen noodles and plain rice. February won't be so bad, but I'm not getting my VA education payment in January since I barely had classes in December. Well, I had seven days of classes, so I should get a little more than $200, but will need to spend that on books since classes start 1/16. I won't get my full benefits in February either, but it'll be close to $450 so that'll be fabulous. Once I get my full benefits in March, we'll be okay. Until the semester ends again.