The Overdue Christmas Issue

Christmas, so long in coming, blew through the Henderson Rizk household like a tornado, leaving scraps of wrapping paper, tricycles, airplane ticket stubs and who knows what else in its wake. Reid, K and I traversed the Eastern seaboard apart and together, celebrating the holiday with friends and family.

First and foremost, as I would have wished if my parents wrote a blog about me when I was two, I must say that Reid's gift haul was awesome. Some of the highlights were the crazy fire truck positively bristling with latches, locks and sliders, each hiding a little chamber which can be filled with the tiny, easily lost detritus of toddler life. Reid also received a great multi-purpose gift, the Fisher Price Little People Animal Sounds Farm. Reid calls the Little People "my peoples" which is just about hysterical. The farm has a cow, a pig, a lamb, a chicken, a horse, and a farmer and makes the noises of all these mammals and birds (the farmer sounds include, interestingly, sawing wood and snoring). Another gift that I need to mention is a 70-piece, wooden railroad track similar to the ones which cost a great deal of money and are affiliated with a major British train-themed children's program.

I include all three of these toys together because Reid has united them as a massive multi-toy. How? Well, the people and animals from the farm are periodically corralled together with the trees, houses and other accessories from the train track and herded into the various sections of the latches fire truck and driven around the family room. If I ask nicely, Reid will permit me to keep the train itself out of the firetruck omnibus toy transportation system so I can build complex and usually incomplete configurations with the wooden toy track and then attempt to impress my son by crashing the train. He feigns interest and continues to point out various sights to the farmer, chicken and trees in the firetruck.

Of course, the most outstandingly important gift this Christmas was a tricycle, which in our house is a "bike." Weather, travel, the unfortunate tendency of the sun to go down before 5 pm this time of year and a dozen other factors have conspired to keep the bike on ice in the weeks since Christmas, so we're really hoping for a renaissance of this particular gift when the spring comes around. Reid did really seem to like it. He rode it a bit outside Christmas morning but tired, I suspect, of the squadron of parents and grandparents standing around our street shouting for him to pedal, as if he knew what it meant to pedal something. As I said, we'll try again after the thaw.

The next phase of our Christmas holiday was Reid's visit to Atlanta with his grandparents while mom and dad spent a recuperative couple days attending screenings of long-form dramatic presentations in darkened rooms which non-parents of toddlers call 'movies.' Quite an interesting phenomenon. Also, we simultaneously ate food in a restaurant, as opposed to trading off eating and Reid-feeding like tag-team wresters. Oh, and there was also the silence. It went like this:







So good.

Then phase three began. In this phase we met up with Reid in Alabama, and attended an anniversary party for K's aunt and uncle there. The party yielded that nice picture at the top of the post with Katrena, Reid and Reid's cousin Samantha, who apparently was offended by something Reid did moments before the photo was snapped. The event was quite nice, and featured a bunch of young kids, all of whom were girls save Reid. He was quite the player, let me tell you. Happy anniversary, Richard and Pam.


Next we drove to K's aunt Kathy and uncle Don's house. Little did we expect, Reid found himself completely overwhelmed with gigantic things toddlers love. Above, Reid scrambles about on the garaged fishing boat out behind Don and Kathy's house. Reid is carefully selecting a fishing lure from uncle Don's carefully organized selection while aunt Kathy looks on.

Don and Kathy's also featured Reid's first ride in a dump truck. Don took Reid and me around the neighborhood, and Reid got to hear his voice through the citizens band radio and basically bounce all over the front seat while surveying Leeds, Alabama from a startling height.

But things pretty much went off the toddler-coolness scale when Don managed to coax some life into his four-wheeler. I don't recall for certain, but I think he needed to jump it or something, but eventually he was able to get the thing revving and Reid and he cruised around the property like lords of the modern-day manor.




So happy new year. After returning from Alabama on new year's eve, we laid low and K and I rang in the new year by going to bed early. Party animals, I tell ya. The next day, my sister went to the hospital and delivered a beautiful baby girl, Petra, who joins Reid, Daniel and Brianna as the generation who will take care of us in our old age. Good luck, kids! You're gonna need it.