Silly Rachel stories

Everyone got new highlighters in their stocking (except for Phoebe who abuses highlighters). Rachel pulled out her highlighter and fiddled with it for a while before saying, "This button does nothing! How does this highlighter even work?!"

"You just...take the cap off..." I told her.

"What?!" she said. "Oh! That's not a button...that's just the end of the highlighter!"

As it turns out, her highlighter works just fine.

I love how she's looking at that highlighter like it betrayed her somehow.

Also, those pants! She sewed them herself! In her sewing class!

In which she got a (n at times painful and very well-earned) A!

*****

We also got Rachel some wooden spoons for Christmas (in addition to other boring grown up presents). She was intrigued by the faces on the spoons. They're friendly faces...to remind her that we love her...while she's away at college (I'm not crying—you're crying).

And then Rachel says, "Hmmm...I wonder...if you were to smack someone with this spoon would it leave a face-shaped welt?" And she just...whacked herself. I mean, really whacked herself. She held nothing back. It was quite shocking to everyone (herself included).

And she determined that it does, in fact, leave a bit of a face-shaped welt. Science! 

She also learned that she probably shouldn't be going around hitting herself (or anybody) with wooden spoons.

*****

The last Rachel story (for now) is that she helped me wrap quite a few presents. It was really a tremendous help!* Sometimes she just came up to my room and wrapped while I worked. Other times we turned on a good ol' fashioned chick flic...like Sense and Sensibility or Emma...and we'd wrap a few things before putting gifts aside and settling in to enjoy the film. Tonight she wanted to watch Little Women. I've had a lot of fun watching movies with my big girls and I thought to myself, "Gee—I finally knows how Andrew feels when the kids want to do a Lord of the Rings marathon over Christmas!"

And then Rachel asked if they could still watch LOTR over the break, so I'll probably end up doing some work while he watches with the kids because he has more patience for those battle scenes than I do (and vice versa for the Austenian love triangles).

Anyway, Rachel was helping me wrap things and I brought out a present for her that I thought she could safely wrap since it came in a box. But then I realized that it said on the box what was inside, so I censored that bit before handing it to her. She thought that was hilarious.

Here she is opening it:

And noting the censored bit:

It's a book that looks like—yet is not—a copy of her favourite book:

Rachel didn't ask for very much this Christmas. She's usually pretty good about making what I consider to be a a reasonable list of present ideas. She doesn't put anything extraordinary on her list—no shooting for the stars for this kid. That's not necessarily how my other kids operate (ask me about Benjamin), but it's how Rachel operates and it's been very nice.

This year she was just drawing blanks. She wanted things that were useful for striking out on her own, but didn't know where to begin, really. So I had to think of things to get her all by myself...which...was hard. Gift-giving isn't one of my natural talents.

But I looked around at things and brainstormed and came up with some good things (I think) and it just so happened that I thought a lot of them would be things that Miriam might also like (or need in the next few years). And a lot of things just happened to come in a two-pack anyway (or at a discounted price in a two-pack). So several of Rachel and Miriam's gifts were somewhat identical, a fact I forgot when I handed Rachel a box full of Miriam's presents and had her wrap them.

Here's Miriam opening a bird-shaped lamp. It can hang or it can rest on a stand. It comes with a charger but can also be used cordlessly. I thought it would be useful during our somewhat regular power outages—to use in the bathroom or carry while walking down the stairs. It's like a flashlight but tweeter....er...sweeter.

When Rachel was wrapping this she was like, "Oh! This is so cute! Look at how adorable this little lamp is! I would love something like this!"

And internally I was like, "Oh, man! I forgot that I bought two of everything!" while externally I said, "Oh, uh...well...I mean...your sister made a list...you didn't...so..."

And here's Rachel opening up the very same little bird lamp:

The same thing happened with the battery pack she wrapped for Miriam (like...a portable charger for your phone—what are those called?). Believing these items had originated on Miriam's wish list (they didn't—they came straight from my gift-giving brain!) Rachel was like, "Oooh! Miriam has such good ideas! If you're still looking for gift ideas for me...this would be a good gift!"

And knowing full well that I had a second (and nearly identical) charger sitting in my closet for her I was like, "Gee...I dunno...it's getting kinda close to Christmas to order anything new..."

When I wrapped her present I wrote, "I gotchu, boo!" on it and she read that today and was like, "Huh." 

And then when she saw what was inside she was like, "Oh! You do got me!"

Only I accidentally put the black charger in Miriam's pile and the pink charger in Rachel's pile when I had meant for it to be the other way around. The picture on the boxes was the same, but there was a checkmark of colour that I missed. And I knew that I had ordered two different colours in the two-pack option but I forgot that when I was parcelling them out. But it didn't matter.

The girls organically switched chargers after the fact (so my intended colour selection was accurate, even if I got them switched up in the act).

* The youth also had a gift-wrapping service night and Benjamin wrapped several things for Phoebe that night, which was also a huge help.