What Christmas part 2 looked like

Happy 2013! May this year bring our family and yours more tears of joy than sadness. We rang in the new year with our family in Davenport and celebrated Christmas with them. After two sessions of gift opening (I swear it's like those presents were procreating under that tree! He's a lucky duck, this kid!) Dexter left with a trunk full of new toys which was kind of perfect because he's kind of been stuck playing with some real 12 month old kid stuff this past few months and all of us were getting pretty bored (but not bored enough to buy him new toys ourselves ;)).

We also hit up the Children's Museum in Bettendorf. It had been one of those things we kept saying we should go do and we finally up and did it. It was totally worth it, especially for a kid that's been cooped up with his mom because snow and her haven't been on speaking terms since 2004. While being smaller and having less activities than Omaha's Children Museum, (which was my first tour of children's museums and therefore makes me an expert, ahem),it definitely is a perfect spot for crazy toddlers that like to run around without purpose or direction. Your kid wants to run up and down a bridge while another kid roars at him like a dinosaur every time he passes? Strange but totally acceptable, cute even. If your kid's into that kind of thing, this is the spot for you. There's a lot of ignoring social boundaries and norms around this place, you know the typical toddler/preschooler hijinx that makes everyone judge everyone else's parenting. It's good wholesome fun and oooh, look a water table!

 

     
P.S. You know what's not wholesome fun? This game which the grown-ups played three times while Dexter and Owen were all snug in their beds with visions of sugar plum fairies dancing in their little boy heads.