"I found Jesus!!"

Oh the joys of Fisher Price Little People. My mother gave Elisabeth a Fisher Price Nativity Set for Christmas. We let her open it at Thanksgiving so that she could play with it in context of the Christmas season. The set is really nice, it has a stable, a baby Jesus, a manger, Joseph, Mary, a whole slew of animals, three wise men, and two angels. When you combine those people with the Noah's Ark set and the Farm set that she already had, we have about a hundred animals. She is so creative when she plays with the animals. She lines them up and then makes them jump off of the coffee table because they've been bad, or she lines them up and makes them have a parade, she has them talk to each other, they chase the angels - it is all very cute to watch.

When she opened the Nativity Set, she immediately developed a fondness for baby Jesus. This is probably because of Charlotte. Baby Jesus in his manger looks an awful lot like Baby Charlotte in her papasan style swing.

Here's the evidence:

Baby Charlotte (excuse the flower costume)

Baby Jesus:

She immediately took the Baby Jesus and put him under her shirt and pretended to be pregnant. She drug Doug into the play room and said "quick! I'm having a baby!" He dutifully went with her and witnessed as Dr. Mickey Mouse, Obstetrician assisted in the birth of Baby Jesus. And then, remembering back to when I had Charlotte and she stayed home with Grandmommy - she made Doug re-enact the entire scene. He had to pretend to be Elisabeth and Minnie Mouse was Grandmommy bringing her to the hospital to see me. What does she remember most about meeting her new baby sister, you might ask? The jello. The nurses had just brought me my first post-surgery meal - and I was starving. A big bowl of yellow jello. And did I get to eat any of it? nope. That, my friends, is the kind of sacrifice a mother makes for her kid.

So anyway, baby Jesus got lost. This isn't a surprise, it is a sheer miracle we can find our shoes sometimes. Elisabeth has a memory like none other, though, so it is a little surprising when she loses something. Doug and I have decided this is because she has way more available memory than he and I do - we're constantly swapping whereas she's a blank slate. So she lost Baby Jesus somehow. A week or so went by. We were sitting in the family room doing something and we hear, from the kitchen, in the most excited tone you can imagine, "I FOUND JESUS!!! MOMMY!! DADDY!!! I FOUND HIM! I FOUND JESUS!" We went running, and there she was proudly holding little Baby Jesus in his manger. We tried to conceal our laughter, but really - that just isn't possible sometimes.

I'm pretty sure this isn't what my mother had in mind when she sent her a nativity set...