I raced to Target after work and managed to get about 95% of the various shopping for kids out of the way. With five grandkids between six months and six years, plus the Kid of my own, by the time I made it to the checkout line my cart was crammed to bursting with toys, games, stuffed animals, puzzles… Gah! I then felt obliged to explain to the checker that I was shopping for six kids. I didn’t want her to think I was going this overboard for just one or two kids. I may have to pick up one more toy each for the two oldest grands, but at this point I at least feel like I’ve made significant progress. Whew!

The trick then was figuring a way to pile all of the bags of toys in the back of my little Honda Fit so that Anna wouldn’t see them–since my next stop was to pick her up from daycare. Thankfully one consistent thing about my vehicle is that it’s always full of junk, so with strategic positioning of the usual crap and a leather coat, I successfully shielded the tell-tale red and white bags from her prying little eyes. But then it was back to Target to get a tree. Yes, it is less than a week until Christmas, and we have yet to get a tree. And at this late hour there’s no way I’m going to shell out the bucks for a real tree, so we got a quite modest little artificial thing and a couple of containers of cheap ball ornaments.

Anna did the majority of the decorating herself, and even managed to understand the concept of even distribution of ornaments. Of course then she wanted to “make it pretty” by putting lots of present underneath it, and promptly pulled some of her socks out of the clean laundry pile and wrapped them up. However, the coolest thing was that she wanted to sing Christmas carols while we were decorating the tree. It was charming and sweet and something I will remember for the rest of my life.