This weekend, the Admiral Emeritus and his wife came to visit us for an early Christmas celebration. We made a big Christmas dinner and invited our son's in-laws to join the First Mate and I, our son David and his wife Missy, the Little Admiral, and Missy's sister DeeAnn and her boyfriend Andy, who's renting a room at our house now. My dad and his wife wound up buying the Little Admiral a Little People Discovery Village, one of a wonderful set of Little People toys from Fisher Price. It's so wonderful, in fact, that the gift duplicated one that the First Mate and I had already bought for her. (She'll get our gifts on Christmas Day.)

Here's the Little Admiral ignoring everyone and everything else to play with her new toys, along with the Admiral Emeritus and her daddy looking on from the background:

This toy actually brought quite a bit of mirth to the adults as well as the Little Admiral, who jumped up and down squealing "My Peoples!" when she unwrapped the gift. You see the little circular roadway? That spins when a button is pressed, and music plays briefly. At the end of the music, the toy plays what supposedly is engine noise. You can judge for yourself, but the consensus is that the sample relates to a completely different kind of gas.

Of course, this matters little to Kayla, who loved the new toy. However, when you're dealing with a two-year-old toddler, sometimes it's not all good when a child is that taken with a gift. Normally, we leave her toys from our family here at our house as the First Mate watches her during the week while Mommy and Daddy are at school and work. When it was time to go home, she pitched the kind of fit that only two-year-olds can pitch, and it lasted all the way out to the car ... as far as we knew.

It turned out to last a lot longer than that. In fact, she continued her tantrum all the way home, and at one point ran out the door into the minus-19-degree night, pounding on the garage door and demanding to come back to our house so she could be with her "Peoples." (I don't expect Fisher-Price to use this as a recommendation ...) It took almost two hours to get her to calm down -- and the next day, the toy went home with the Little Admiral. I had already exchanged our set for another Little People set, so now we may well wind up with the same problem on Christmas Day.

The Admiral Emeritus, meanwhile, escaped home to California today. Coward.

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