What We Did This Weekend: White Elephants and Babysitting

We were invited to a White Elephant party Friday night, so we wrapped up our junk and were on our way to the festivities. In my opinion there are three kinds of white elephant gifts. 

1. The kind where the wrapping is more valuable than the junk inside it.
   
2. The kind that is very, very funny.
   
3. And the kind that is so nice every one (including you) wonders whether the giver understands the white elephant concept. 
   

According to Wikipedia (The Free Encyclopedia), the term white elephant refers to a gift whose cost exceeds its usefulness. That's probably true, but these days a white elephant is usually some odd or horrific gift that someone gave to you that you never plan on using. But you hang on to it just in case you're invited to a White Elephant gift exchange. Some of the most popular white elephants we've given were a box of unopened, and never-frozen Otter Pops, or the combination foot bath/vibrating massager. One of the best I've ever received was one of those little video game controllers that plugs directly into your TV and has old Atari-like games built-in.

Friday Brookie ended up with a really nice Christmas ornament, and I ended up with something very, very funny (sorry, but for reasons I may not reveal at this time, I cannot tell you exactly what that very, very funny present was). Aside from the gift exchange the rest of the evening was fun as we just visited with friends and ate some great Christmas goodies. 

Saturday night we were lucky enough to babysit for the vice principal from the middle school where Brookie works. She and her husband had a Christmas party to attend, so they left us with their two girls under two. Those little girls were so much fun. The older sister (about 18 months) is running around and is at that age where she's really funny. At dinner she was singing something. The lyrics were a little incomprehensible, but I thought I recognized the tune. She was singing the alphabet song. The melody was spot-on, but she just needs to work on the actual alphabet. Her little sister (about 6 months) was also fun. She was so much different than her sister was at that age. It was a chore to get her sister to sleep when she was a little baby. But this little girl was asleep when we got there, woke up at about 5:30pm, and at 8:00pm, she was dozing like a grandpa on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner. Every time we watch someone's kids, we just marvel. How do they do it? We're excited to find out some day (hopefully soon). 

And that's what we did this weekend. Watch for a special bonus post tomorrow.