It's sometimes a good thing that our four year old has what I call a "narrow focus." When she's thinking about or concentrating on something, she is really and completely "all there" -- her attention fully focused on whatever it is she's trying to do.
Take yesterday, for example. Her Daddy was calling for her, trying to figure out where she was, and she called back from the study. Now I use the term "study" loosely. We've not really had a study since we moved a desk and hundreds of books out of the room that used to be the study and is now the sweet girl's bedroom. Almost five years ago we crammed them all into a little cave made of bookcases that takes up half our bedroom and is one of the most cluttered unusable spaces you've ever seen. (Someday, yes, we will manage to make it functional...but let's save those thoughts for another day.)
Anyway, the sweet girl doesn't often trek into the study area. It's not officially and utterly off-limits, but it's so crowded with rather boring looking "grown-up junk" that it doesn't usually entice her in. Which is why we've put most of her unwrapped Christmas presents there.
Yes, it's true...we've not yet wrapped or opened presents. We took a couple with us to Virginia, where the sweet girl also received some lovely things from Grandma and her cousins, but we save our official family "Christmas morning" until we're home from travels. We always have that time sometime within the 12 days between Christmas Day and Epiphany. Although this tradition has taken some getting used to, we do enjoy it. (And we can also wait until after Christmas to do most of our shopping for one another, which is so relaxing -- the stores are so much emptier and the prices are almost always discounted!)
But back to yesterday. When D. realized that S. was in the study, he hurried in there, realizing of course that there are a handful of bags and boxes (most of them loosely closed at best) containing her yet-to-be-wrapped presents. I think he rightly expected that she would be getting into them, or at least looking at them and wanting to get into them.
Instead she was busy with the case of paperclips, completely focused on getting some out. "I just need a couple of these," she told her Daddy, who gave her some paperclips of course, and then casually guided our one-track girl out of the room, still totally oblivious to the gifts that surrounded her!
2 comments:
Hehe, very good thing indeed! That's interesting that you wait until later for your home Christmas. My cousins do that too; they come to Erie and then off to Buffalo along with us, and they don't open their presents back home until a few days later after they get back. Extends the holiday! :)
We like it! I confess I do miss having our own little family day together on Christmas. D. and I used to get that, early in our marriage, because we only lived about three hours from his Mom's. We could get up early, open our own gifts by our own tree, then head to his Mom's and be there for a late lunch. That's when we were "east coasters" near Philly.
Since we moved to western PA, we're too far from family in MD and VA to make that plan feasible anymore. I struggle with it from time to time, but it does give us the added blessing of an extended Christmas season, as you said!
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