Happy Dabby New Year!

I stayed up late with Dad to watch the New Year come in. We heard explosions outside at midnight, and we ran out on the porch to see what was going on. Somebody was putting on a fireworks show to welcome in 2021. I felt like it was the Fourth of July all of a sudden. Maybe that's why I felt like grabbing our flag and waving it around as I wished the neighborhood a Happy New Year!

Happy 2021 from me... the Dabbing Devil!

Christmas!

I got Mom and Dad up at about 4 in the morning so we could go open Christmas gifts in the attic. I was so excited, I couldn't wait any longer!

Mom and Dad got me a lot of cool little things, like this Kermit the Frog puppet (I love puppets!) and the next book in my Phoebe and Her Unicorn series. I'm almost done with the book I'm on, so great timing!

 

Grandma got me lots of OMG and LOL dolls. I've been collecting them for a long time now. Thanks, Grandma!

 

And Santa brought me exactly the remote-control car I wanted! How does he always do it? Dad and I had tons of fun running this car around outside later in the day.

But the best stuff of all was my Nintendo Switch. I've been wanting to play Cuphead for months! And then all my action figures and plushies of the Five Nights at Freddy's series! I'm kind of scared to play FNAF on my own, with all the creepy animatronics and the jump scares. But I play it with Dad, and I can't get enough of it. Now I can play pretend (one of my favorite things to do) with all these guys, and it only has to be as scary as I want it to be. And actually, Mom and Dad have already made some of their personalities pretty goofy, so that makes them less scary and more fun too. 

I'm a little bit obsessed with FNAF. When I'm not playing the game with Dad, I'm watching YouTube videos about FNAF, and now I can make up my own adventures with them. I also got some FNAF books to read. 

Thanks, Mom and Dad! You made Christmas awesome!

Crafts and Cookies

You've probably noticed that my mom loves to be artistic. We spend a lot of time on art in my schooling, which I don't mind at all.

A lot of the stuff we've been doing recently is Christmas-related... like baking cookies for Santa. (Well, Dad ended up eating most of them.)

The gingerbread house is an annual tradition. (Dad didn't eat most of that.)

I helped Mom with her German stars and these cool Christmas bulb cocoa mixes. She's giving them out as gifts this year. The stars are so pretty!

And then there were the mosaics! Mom and I did these at a store here in town called Eureka Sally. The owner, Sally, puts on lots of artsy classes. We used to do the clay classes there, but now we're making stuff with glass. This is my starfish, which I think came out looking pretty cool...

And here's Mom's creation: Thor's hammer. Cool! She's been reading to me lately about Norse mythology.

Dad usually doesn't get to come with us to Sally's because of his work schedule, but on Christmas Eve, he had time to come along and do some chocolate-making! Sally told us the history of chocolate, how it grows, how it's made, everything. We got to mix and match different ingredients, like sugar, flavorings, nuts, raisins, stuff like that. I didn't really like how bitter the dark chocolate was, but it was still a lot of fun to create my own candy bar with Mom and Dad!

I'm excited to see what we come up with next! I love being creative!

Maynard and Middle-Earth

We have a friend in town who's a really awesome handyman. He helped us make a wooden backing for this cool map of Middle-Earth that my mom bought a long time ago. She planned to put it above our bed. And now it's done! Have I mentioned that my mom and dad are total Lord of the Rings nerds?

Maynard seems to like it. I wonder where he wants to visit first? I think he'd fit right in with the hobbits in the Shire.

Letter to Santa

There's a store here in our town that mails letters to Santa every year. We stopped by Johnson's Gems today, and I got mine sent off. I asked for a remote-control car I saw a while back. It's a blue Jeep-looking off-road thing with big knobby tires, and I remember it said 5:1 scale on the side. Dad says the smaller the number, the bigger the car is, so 5:1 means it would take five of the RC car I want to make a life-size car. That's pretty big!

Mom and Dad put in their requests for Santa gifts, too. I bet he comes through for them, too. The elves and Yetis must be really busy up at the North Pole. (If you've ever seen Rise of the Guardians, you know what I mean!)

And there it goes! Let's see what Christmas morning brings!

The Two Trees

 It's like The Two Towers, but not. 

We bought a second Christmas tree last year to put in our attic this year. Why? Because we have three dogs, and they like to eat Christmas ornaments. 

So we put our old tree (like really old... it's been around longer than I've been alive) downstairs in the living room, with all our unbreakable ornaments. 

And our new tree with our breakable stuff is prettying up the attic. Two of our three dogs go up there, but the one that destroys most of our stuff won't climb the stairs. So it all works out.

We had to clean the attic up to make room for the tree, and in the process, we made a secret hideout for me under some of the shelves at the far end of the room. We put up curtains and some stick-up lights, so now it's like the Fort Miranda I used to have under the raised bed at our old house. 

Our attic is actually pretty cool. Part of it is storage, part of it is my classroom, and part is now my play area and our tree, which Mom and Dad said we're going to keep up all year and change the decorations with the different holidays. 

I can't wait for Christmas!

Thanksgiving!

Our Thanksgiving this year was just the three of us. But then it usually is. Like I've said before, not a whole lot has changed for us. 

Mom and Dad have a couple of Thanksgiving traditions that we kept alive this year. The first one is listening to "Alice's Restaurant" while we eat. It's one of Dad's old hippie songs. It's a war protest with a funny story, and it's REALLY long. 

They also watch the Lord of the Rings movies over Thursday and Friday. Not because the movies have anything to do with Thanksgiving, but because they love the movies and they've almost always been off work those two days. (Dad works on the weekends.) We watched in Dad's office this year, with the big screen hooked up to his stereo. He just got his office (mostly) done. I love hanging out in there with him!

In the movie, the hobbits mention eating seven meals a day... breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper. We've tried that ourselves a couple of times, including on Thanksgiving Day. We barely managed to do it, because we were all stuffed! But we made sure to leave room for dinner, which was our main event as far as meals go.

Even Chip got to have some Thanksgiving dinner with us!

As my dad likes to say, I hope you all had a Thanksgiving dinner that can't be beat. (It's an Arlo Guthrie thing.)