First Christmas as Four

It's the evening of Christmas Day, and there is hardly a good excuse for not having written at all since the birth of our beautiful daughter, Raya. The trite observation that parenthood--now squared--leaves little time for hobbies such as blogs remains, however, sadly true.
Sava is three-and-a-half, and this year for the first time he is truly excited by Christmas. Last night before going to bed he asked me whether Santa will make a lot of noise coming down the chimney and then going back up to his sleigh. I assured him that Santa hates waking up people since he likes to do his job by stealth.
Unlike last year, when he opened one present on Christmas day, and took several days to go through the remaining several presents--so enchanted was he each time he opened a new present and began to play with it--this year Sava opened ALL presents in no more than fifteen minutes. Eager to find out everything that Santa had brought him, he ripped one package open and then immediately moved on to the next. Besides various small items from his grandma, he got a scooter that he is still too fearful to take out on the street, a Tonka bank truck which he had been begging to get for the past two months (and which his mommy was none too thrilled to buy, since our house is becoming an exhibit of Tonka stuff), a game called Busytown based on the Richard Scarry books, a bunch of craft materials like sequins and sparkly glue, and, favorite of all, a plastic bin filled with "coffee sand" and about a dozen steel mini Tonka trucks. I got the idea for the latter during his last week of preschool, when I saw him playing with a similar setup, and asked teacher Laura how they had concocted the dirt that the kids so loved to push their trucks through. She directed me to Lisa Murphy's "Ooey Gooey Handbook," which has been a wonderful resource for other arts projects at home as well; the sand is made of dried used ground coffee, cornmeal, flour, and salt, all mixed together. Although he had not specifically asked for them, as he had for the scooter and the Tonka truck, the mini trucks with the "coffee sand" seem to be this year's favorite.