Bouncing Our Way into 2014

For Christmas, Jeff's mom kindly and generously gave us a gift card to Walmart, with a certain amount of money specified for each person to spend on whatever he or she wanted.  So far, with my portion, I've only purchased a scrumptious scented candle; I do, however, have my sights on a...wait for it...new kitchen trashcan!!  I'm a wild spender, I tell ya!  :)

Well, you can imagine how excited the boys were to go to Walmart and pick out their gifts, so a few days after Christmas, I loaded up all the kids into the Big White Van, and we went shopping.  I don't often do that, but I guess I was feeling brave that day.  :)  Actually, the trip went very well, and nobody even made any off-the-wall comments to me about the size of my family...until we were in the parking lot, almost to our van.  Then an older lady saw us, stopped walking, and said, "If I had a camera, that would make a GREAT picture!"  I wasn't quite sure what she meant by that, but I'll just assume it was the nicest kind of compliment.  :)

I wasn't sure what to get for Moriah; after all, she doesn't really NEED anything, and she's too little to express much of a preference for anything.  But as we stood in one of the toy aisles, and the big boys deliberated about exactly which Nerf guns to get, and whether they would have any money left over for anything else, and Tobin held onto his superheroes LEGO set that he chose, and Shav looked at his Toothless dragon that shoots real steam and light(!), I glanced around, and my eyes fell on a box containing this:

Can you tell what it is?  We can't really figure out a good name for it, so we usually end up calling it the bouncy house, or the indoor bouncy thing, or the blow-up playpen, or some other profound name like that.

When I saw it, I immediately thought of how much fun Moriah would have with it.  The girl LOVES to bounce.  She'll bounce in her bed, on the couch if anyone is so kind as to help her up on it, on the trampoline when it's warm, on pillows on the floor, and even on us.  She can't really jump yet and get her feet off the ground, but she sure tries.

Another thing about Moriah: she's more of a move-around-and-do-stuff girl, rather than a sit-down-and-play-with-a-pile-of-toys kind of child.  She does play with toys sometimes, and in her bed before she falls asleep (and after she wakes up) is a particularly good time for her to sit and do that--and look at books, too.  But when she's down on the floor and ready to play, it almost always involves whole-body movement.  And if she can get her brothers or me or someone to do it with her, that's the cherry on top!  :)

So for all these reasons, I figured this would be the best gift for Moriah.

I think I was right.  :)

I know these pictures have been blurry, but it's pretty tough to take natural-light, evening-time pictures of on-the-move bouncing kids without having some blur...especially for one who knows so little about the technical side of photography and camera settings.  Oh, well, I don't mind the blur, since it shows the joy.  :)

The action the first evening we had it...

Thanks a million, Grandma Fisher, from Moriah and all her big brothers for such a cool gift!!!!!  :)