As our family grows, there has become a truce on noisy toys. When the first child, Max, was born we all bought any cool, fun, noisy toys we could find. But as he got older we started to get subtle "threats" about paybacks for those noisy toys. Then Lucy was born, Rudy came home, and Bill & Renee got married. Now everyone has a fear of payback for toys that are too noisy so this was a relatively quiet Christmas in that respect.
However, while cleaning for Christmas Eve at our house, I earned a new appreciation for noisy toys. Since Rudy has only been home 2 months, 1 week and 6 days (no I'm not counting - see the ticker at the bottom of the page), we are still a little reluctant to leave him in certain parts of the house while we are in other parts. But I really needed to clean upstairs and he was happily playing with all his cars and trucks and buses and anything else that had wheels, so upstairs I went. One of the cars makes a noise when you shake it (thanks, Patti & Chris), so every minute or so I could hear that car and know that Rudy wasn't getting into anything since he was still moving his parade of cars. This does not mean that it is open season on noisy toys. Just that they certainly do have their place.
As for Christmas, we had three days of presents. Rudy is going to have a hard time after January when he no longer will receive presents on a regular basis.
Sunday we celebrated with my family at Chris & Patti's house. Here are Rudy and Max helping Grandpa open a present.
And here is Rudy with Lucy.
Monday we had Paul's family over our house. Here's Rudy with one of his favorite people 'loco Neil'.
And Christmas morning it was just the 3 of us - by now Rudy was a pro at what to do with presents.
