I was wondering the same thing earlier today...about abstract nouns like peace and joy and love. I suppose I could ask, "can you have more of that?" but I think answering yes is not necessarily any clearer than if I asked it about an adjective (well, this could be more big or more red). I'm curious about how structuralism in linguistics relates to structuralism in literary criticism. Honestly, I only know there's a relationship at all because of a quick skim of a wikipedia article last night. But I know enough about structuralism from grad school to know that not everyone thinks Lacan is all that, you know? Are there not similar debates in linguistics?

My '99 Toyota Sienna is still going strong with 175,000 miles on it.

Mine buy for each other and for us and make presents (I think this year we're doing chocolate covered pretzels) for other family members. This year DS9 is using all his own money; the younger two use some money from allowance, but we supplement as needed.

My childhood memories of Christmas involve my Dad sitting in the living room floor, trying to fit a million color-coded branches into the right slots on our fake tree. I think I was probably 10 or 11 before I even realized people still used real trees. Despite this nostalgic association I have for fake trees, we always do real ones here. I won't have it any other way. We cut our own locally one year, but I really just don't like the ones that grow around here (mostly Leyland Cypresses, as far as I can tell. though they don't drop their needles, and that's kind of nice). This year the kids fell in love with a Noble fir, so we went ahead and bought it, even though it was $30 more than comparable Frasier firs. I have to admit, it's a really pretty tree.

But a bit of a spin off of this...I'm not sure what the politics of it are these days, but back when we did flyball, people were cross-breeding dogs specifically for flyball, and it was, at least at the time, very controversial. People crossed border collies with jack russells, for example, to get Border Jacks, and border collies with border terriers to get Border Borders. Does this change things, do you think? (general "you"; I'm quoting jazzyfizzle because it was the last post I saw that related to this, not because I'm only interested in her opinion on it). Is it okay to breed dogs for a specific purpose like that, or do some of the same ethical problems apply? (I find this discussion interesting, but not especially relevant to me, since all of my current and probably all of my future dogs are rescue mutts (well, we suspect that one of them might actually, somehow or other, be a Bergamasco, but he's from a shelter. anyway)).

Umm, we have bookshelves in every room of the house, except the bathrooms. The "school" books are in our school room, most grown-up books are in my bedroom, except the nicer hardcover ones, which are in a nice, glass-fronted bookcase in my living room, kid books are mostly in the kids' rooms, with some on an extra shelf in our office/den.

I never did. I was only 24 when we bought our first house, but even before that being a renter always made me feel kind of vulnerable and insecure. I think a lot of it has to do with having animals. I very nearly couldn't move to be close to my then boyfriend, now husband the year after I graduated college (he had another year to go, in an out of state college) because it was so hard to find somewhere I could take my dog. When we moved to Boston after he graduated, we went to a realtor and took the ONE listing she had that was pet-friendly. Might also have to do with my childhood...I lived in one house (a house my Dad built himself) until my parents got divorced when I was 10, and after that we bounced from rental house to rental house for years. So I think I probably tend to associate renting with instability and, umm, emotional trauma? That might be overstating it a bit, but something like that.

Ours is self-cleaning. I think we've cleaned it once in the 6 or 7 years we've had it.

Mine is getting a couple of nerf guns, and probably some hex bugs. He's also getting a stuffed Totoro, and I'm trying to find him some Avatar: The Last Airbender stuff on ebay, but that's kind of of less universal interest.

My mom lives 5 minutes away, but she never offers to take the kids. I ask every 2 or 3 months, on average, and she'll watch them for a few hours while DH and I go out to eat or Christmas shopping or whatever. I vacillate between being really sad about it and trying to be grateful that at least I have someone there who will help out when I really need it. Mostly, I just can't understand not wanting to spend more time with your grandkids. When they do go over there, she puts a video on for them for the whole time.

My wish list has: a new post-diaper bag but still big enough for kid stuff bag Sodastream soda maker Roku Autobiography of Mark Twain Sleepwalk with Me by Mike Birbiglia

Yep. I think it's going to mean one more shopping trip for me this year, in fact. I can remember my mom always freaking out about whether my brother and I had the same number of presents...like until we were in college. We finally had to tell her we really didn't care!

Okay, I posted a couple of weeks ago that each kid would get 4 or 5 from us, plus one or two Santa gifts, but I just looked through everything last night and there's actually...more. A lot of them are little things like a paperback book or some Mario t-shirts that were on clearance at Target, but it looks like it'll be more like 8 or 9 each to unwrap, plus a couple that are for all of them to share.

My mother had a cockatiel who just died a few months ago. He was a nice bird--learned to talk quite a bit, friendly, etc. One big thing I'd emphasize, though, is that a bird like a cockatiel is a big, long term commitment. My mom's bird lived well over 20 years. For the first few years, it was great. She got him out a lot, taught him to talk, etc. Then the kids moved out, the house filled up with other pets so he couldn't be out of the cage...he spent the last 15 years of his life sitting in that cage trying to get someone to talk to him. It was really sad. IME, birds are really needy; they're more pathetic than a dog when you neglect them...so make sure someone's going to have the time and inclination to spend a good bit of time with the bird every day for the next 25 years.

camera?

:iagree: definitely. Elf is awesome.

When we have homegrown tomatoes in the summer, I'll make sauce from those. But honestly, my very favorite sauce is Ragu Old World Style. It's what my grandmother always used, so nothing else tastes quite right to me.

Honestly, I'm a lot less conflicted NOW about Santa than I was when my kids were littler. I think actually watching them grow up and seeing how they process information about fantasy vs. reality and all that has done away with all the fears about doing the wrong thing I had when they were little. Santa is a relatively minor part of our Christmas, but he is there. I've never been invested in prolonging the kids' belief in Santa. I do the "what do you think?" thing when they ask questions. At this point, I think my 9 and 7 year olds are both at the point where they don't really believe, but don't quite want to let the story go completely. My five year old, cynical beyond his years because of his two big brothers, is wrestling with it more actively this year. The other day he told me, "I do believe in Santa, but not too much." It's pretty clear to me from watching my kids that learning to distinguish fantasy from reality is very much a developmental thing. When my middle DS was 4 and 5, he would get very upset if you tried to tell him that Superman wasn't real. He's seven now, and it's only been a few months since the last time he said, "I don't know yet if I'm a wizard. I guess I'll find out when I'm 11." Basically, I think the line between fantasy and reality is much blurrier for kids than for adults. It just sort of...doesn't matter as much to them. So I see my five year old existing very comfortably in a space where he can sort of believe Santa is real and sort of not. It doesn't bother him. I try to honor that process for them. I put the Santa story out there, because it's fun, but I'm ready to answer questions when they need me to. When "what do you think?" doesn't cut it anymore, I'll tell them what they want to know.

We usually start around 7...the kids see their Santa presents and go through their stockings first. Then we open presents one at a time. This whole process goes on until my mom and stepdad and my brother and SIL come over with more presents, usually around 8:30 or 9. Then it's more unwrapping, one at a time, for another hour or so.

To be clear, we don't do unwrapped Santa presents to save time. For me, that moment when the kids come downstairs and see the display of Santa stuff for the first time is an integral part of Christmas. I think we probably spend more time thinking through the aesthetics of the Santa set-up than we would on wrapping the presents. We do Santa-lite compared to how my parents did it; Santa brings one or two presents plus the stocking stuff....it was a conscious decision that we made for various reasons, but it makes me a little sad sometimes that my kids don't have quite the same first moment of Christmas experience that I did.

You know, my mom is from upstate New York, and I'd be very surprised if she were not the one who decided whether Santa wrapped presents or not when I was a kid. I'll have to ask her how they did things back in Utica, but I seem to remember having seen pictures of unwrapped Santa displays from her childhood. Okay, I just called her. Santa doesn't wrap presents in upstate NY. Interestingly, my stepmother, who is from California, actually wrapped the presents in our stockings for at least a couple of years. ETA: DH reports that Santa wrapped his presents. He grew up in GA, but his mom is from Massachusetts. His Dad is from Long Island, but he's Jewish, so I don't think he counts (where Santa is concerned)

no way!

Ha--us, too! (well, ours is in the living room). We had a whole row of them taped to the ceiling, and all except one eventually fell down. We need to make some friends for that one this year.

Susanna Delia Rosalie

The second option is the closest, so I picked that. My kids can use screens for a little while in the morning if they wake up earlier than I do, as long as they let me sleep. And then they get an hour starting at 4 (or whenever we get home, if we're out at 4). It's not conditional on school being done, really, but only because we don't have any trouble finishing by 4. They have to spend an hour outside, weather permitting, before they can have screen time, though. We also sometimes watch school related movies outside of that time, and we often watch a movie together on weekends.