Holidays with kids, man!  What a trip.

I wish I’d known so many things.  Like, so. many. things.

When you don’t have kids of your own, it looks like one big holly jolly onslaught of merriment.  The truth is…messier.

For example…

I wish I’d known that a gingerbread house making afternoon might actually only take like, thirty minutes and not a delightful full hour or two.  There I was, ready to sit down and relax and work on this thing with my preschooler when — oh, look, we’re done! Maybe it’s because our combined sense of architectual perfection is not at Fallingwater levels (though it’s certainly at Falling DOWN levels) or maybe it’s because a lot of the icing didn’t act as glue-y as I wanted it to, but it was a very short activity!  I was not prepared to still have more of the afternoon to kill! WOE. So either gingerbread kits need to be bigger, or we need to be more detail-oriented over here…

I wish I’d known how grandparents (BLESS THEM etc) would view stuffing children with candy as a holiday tradition, worthy of doing even if dinner is in like half an hour!  Ack! From now on when the grandparents (again, BLESS THEM) are visiting or when we’re visiting them, it’s gonna be like, salad for breakfast kids. Just to even things out a smidge.

I wish I’d known that telling kids cool things about Christmas in order to get them into the holiday spirit is also a really hard thing for some kids, because their sense of time is just different from that of adults.  So telling a kid “on Christmas in a few weeks” is like telling kids, someday when we visit the moon, or, tomorrow when we go to Mars… It’s hard for them to figure out TIME, so like, maybe they wake up some random December morning being all, it’s Christmas yay!  Or they just ask over and over when is it again, how does that work, what is “a few days”? Time is hard for kids! I now tend to keep surprises like Nutcracker tickets and whatnot a surprise until the day of. Bonus: if someone ends up being sick, the epic disappointment doesn’t happen because you can’t be upset about missing what you don’t know you’re missing.  TRUFAX.

I wish I’d know my kid doesn’t *like* marshmallows in her cocoa.  Wouldn’t have bought the bag of fancy ones from Target!

I wish I’d known that kids won’t remember what they got for other family members, or even themselves, and that…maybe it really is the act of giving in the moment that’s fun, just like it’s the act of receiving, and that it doesn’t have to be a huge thought-out thing.  Sometimes if the kid insists she wants to get her dad a bouncy ball for Christmas, that is A-OK. It comes from the heart, after all, and that’s what counts the most. (Ok maybe she just really wanted it for herself! But my point still stands. It doesn’t have to be epic or expensive or even memorable past the chuckle-filled moment of opening it.  Really!)