Bad. Very bad.

Welcome to the 4:30 years.

She crawled into bed with us about quarter after four, whispering, "Did Santa come? Do you think Santa was here?" Santa leaves her stocking at the foot of her bed in order to avoid precisely this type of occurence, but Santa also banks on the fact that there is usually some kind of faint daylight outside at that point.

I pushed it for as long as I could. I tried going back to sleep, I tried lying very quietly and watching A Christmas Story (all hail TBS), and finally sent her to look for her stocking at quarter after five or so.

At six, I gave up and went to start the coffee. As it was brewing, I turned on all the living room lights, plugged in the tree, and fetched KC's and my stockings and brought them into our room. That took another ten minutes.

No one on the street was up except for us. By 7:15 we had decimated the pile under the tree, KC and I had consumed a pot of coffee between us, and all that was left was waiting for a decent hour to call our relatives and to patiently undo the zillions of little plastic twisties that hold toys in their packaging these days.

The jar of pickles was the best reaction all day. Once KC uploads the pictures I will link them, because her face was priceless. Much later, when I was taking a nap, Leah told her daddy, "I gotta say, that was a pretty good joke with the pickles, Daddy. I never saw it coming." Heh.

My mom, her boyfriend, and Tug all got here around one-ish, and once again my living room was a circus. But Mom taught us a new game with dominoes, and Tug and I recited along with A Christmas Story with the sound off, and everyone nibbled on cheese and things, and it was all very nice. Leah got somewaht annoyed with us for talking too loud. She could not hear her talking globe and also "NO ONE IS PAYING ANY ATTENTION TO ME!", which made everyone just howl and only made her madder.

They left around four, and first KC dropped off, and then I went into our room and lay down to read, and then I nodded off. At one point Leah came in and climbed under the covers with me, and then I heard her playing a game with KC. Once I woke up, we all played Scene It (the Harry Potter version, squee!), and KC and I helped Leah win. Best Leah answer, for a "Name this character" question: "Um...um...A WIZARD!" Hah!

Once that was done, it was 9 o'clock, so we sent her to bed with the first Harry Potter book (not a present, I had a spare paperback copy), and before her half-hour of reading time was up, she was sound asleep, firmly surrounded by most of her favorite presents.

It feels like I have been awake forever. Which makes no sense, since I took a two-hour nap somewhere in there, but this morning seems ages away.

It was a good day, though. Leah did not have a single meltdown, and believe me, we were expecting one. KC, in the process of wrapping one of Leah's presents, somehow managed to miss a key piece of hardware and threw it away; how one can miss giant metal hooks in a plastic bag, stored inside the gift, is beyond me, but I imagine that's easily fixable by a quick trip to a hardware store. (It's an over-the-door Barbie organizer, not, like, weaponry.) Something like that is par for the course evry Christmas.

The stuff we gave were all big hits, which makes me happy. My youngest brother called me specifically to say he is loving Good Omens, my sister had what was apparently a giant freak-out when she opened her copy of Serenity ("I did one of your hand-flapping squealy things, Stef!"), her husband, and I quote, "almost peed himself" when he opened the John Deere cookie jar, my mom loved her wine accessories, my stepmom loved the Guggenheim "Russia" book (she is trying to paint an icon), and KC got his Roomba.

And my other brother...well. He went through his stocking filled with toiletries, checked out his new duffel bag (complete with T-shirts and socks), and said, "If you're trying to insinuate that my pits stank, I need a shave, my nails are filthy, and my breath is nasty...well, you'd be right. Thanks! Can I use your bathroom?"

That all makes for a pretty good day, right there. Now to just roll into bed and sleep till the next one.