The Best Presents

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We’re very lucky because two of my friends have children a few years older than Anya, and they are always giving us things their kids have outgrown. I can’t even begin to list all the wonderful things we’ve been given, but among the recent gifts was a bag of books. The books have been sitting in our car about a week until today when we tobogganed them down our still very snowy driveway. Right around the point where we reached the shoveled out part of the driveway near the sheep, Anya hopped off Andy’s shoulders and investigated the items in the little purple sled we borrowed from daycare. She found a book that interested her so much that she didn’t even care that Andy and I had already walked the rest of the way up and gone into the house. He and I peeked out the windows and watched her staring at her book. She’d walk a few steps and then look at the book some more. Walk a few steps. Read. Walk. Read. It looked like she was talking to herself, and then I realized it was a music-making book and she was singing. I’m not sure what made me more happy, that she is such a big girl she can walk up the driveway alone or that she was so excited about her book that she was oblivious to her surroundings.

In other news, we took Anya to a Santa story time at the library two weeks ago. She thought Santa was okay, but the candy canes…those were fantabulous.

While all the other kids sat quietly and listened to Mrs. Clause read stories, Anya got up and ran around and looked at everything in the room. And when we all sang Jingle Bells, Anya got down and boogied.

Boy oh boy does that girl love to dance. Too bad she’s got Andy and I as her dance instructors.


Maybe we should have bought a snowplow…

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We received some snow yesterday. On the drive home I got stuck once on a hill, and while slowwwwwwly creeping up to the top, a pickup came zooming up, trying to keep enough momentum to avoid our predicament. I think their mirror missed ours by about 3 inches. But we made it home! We wisely left the car near the hay shack, although I had to push it up the little hill to get it there. Not that I expect us to move it again before at least Monday or Tuesday…


Lil Loaf’s Younger Brother

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This week we finally got to pick up poor departed Lil Loaf’s new brother, a VW Jetta Sportwagen TDI:

When we first decided to get the car, we couldn’t find any bare bones ones (Anya really liked the giant sunroof, but unfortunately for her she doesn’t have any money). So we ordered a blue one with the extra back airbags. Time went by. After a few weeks I called the dealer, and it was still backordered, and after it went into production it would be another 6 weeks. Since I was getting quite sick of driving the truck, we asked him to see if he could find a base one in any color but black.

A dark gray one was found, coming in within a week. We went down to First Team Auto, and signed all the paperwork. Gave them a check. Dealt with a really annoying woman who tried to sell us undercoating junk (whom we complained about later, and the president told us we weren’t the first to complain that week). Also got a little frustrated with the hard selling of an extended warranty. The next week rolled around, when it should be in…and we get a call from our salesman telling us that it had been sold out from under us. Surprise!

We were a little annoyed. After all, we had given them money and signed all the paperwork with the VIN on it. We wrote an angry email. The president of First Team called me back, it turns out the dealership in Richmond did not log something properly, so a salesman saw the car and didn’t know it was sold. But to make things better, they loaned us another TDI wagon until another one showed up on the 15th of December. They even delivered it to our house in the boonies.

This past Saturday they called and it got here early, so Tuesday we drove out and swapped it for the new one. Hooray!

Now we just need to think of a new license plate. Cabol doesn’t like DAS LOAF.