Video

Our holiday was really quite wonderful, a whirlwind marathon of food and gifts and family. We split our time among several different houses in far corners of the Salt Lake valley, a day with my mother, a night with my father, and a couple afternoons with Jon’s mother. This marks one of the first times I’ve ever been relaxed about Leta’s sleep schedule, and after I let her stay up until almost 11 o’clock one night, a full three hours after her standard bedtime, she rewarded us by sleeping in until almost 9 AM on Christmas morning. I woke up several times waiting to hear her call out for me, and there were a couple times I thought she might be dead, because that could be the only explanation. I didn’t get up to check, though, because if she wasn’t dead I might wake her up, and if she was dead? Well, nothing I could do about that now.

When she finally woke up we brought her into bed with us and told her that Santa Claus had probably visited during the night and brought her presents. There isn’t an adjective to describe just how deeply uninterested she was. Indifferent? Not strong enough. Apathetic? Too kind. Maybe, unimpressed? Is that a word? Something just short of asking me why the hell I would let a strange man like that into the house. She did not want to peek into the living room, no, how about we just lie here in bed all morning and watch TV? And that presented an interesting dilemma, because I totally agreed with her. Let’s do nothing! Who needs presents when you’ve already got a king-size bed that’s one foot away from a television? Let’s take off our pants and scratch our butts! ONLY THING MISSING IS BACON.

About a half-hour later we wandered out into the living room where GEORGE! was snoozing on the couch, and after opening various boring presents that had nothing to do with characters on PBS, she got to the TMX Elmo that the lovely Dr. Tongue (seen here)had given to us on our trip to Calgary. I had anticipated that she might be scared by the sharp, jerky movements of this particular brand of Elmo, which, I don’t know, a part of me was kind of hoping would happen. It would mean that we could spend less time watching Sesame Street and much, much more time watching Access Hollywood, also known as Mommy’s News.

But she was more confused than anything, and when you watch this video you’ll understand why as he seems to be suffering some sort of heart attack, or is so drunk that he can’t remain upright. We now refer to him as Grand Mal Seizure Elmo. Leta got so worried about him that for the rest of the day whenever he started to twitch she would hug him and say, “It’s okay, Elmo. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.” It was a heartbreakingly sweet gesture, at least until he continued to twitch and she squeezed harder. I was prepared to have to tell her, look, Elmo stopped twitching, BECAUSE YOU KILLED HIM.

Quicktime movie (6.5 MB)