Well, I’ve neglected this blog for way too long! Clearly, a lot has happened since the last post! Tom covered a lot of highlights in our holiday card, but the details are all getting lost as we continue to transition to me being full-time (and thus having less time for writing!).
I have a goal to pay more attention to this in the coming year. It’ll be a nice ray of light–like a gratitude journal–in what I can’t help but feel will be a series of really glum news days!
Anyway, today is the first day of 2017. Everyone, even Tom, who came home from LA literally sick to his stomach, managed to ring in the new year! We even Skyped HAKT’s family and raised our glasses at midnight!
It’s been mostly a quiet day. I’m still not sure if I’m going to get this tummy bug or not — but, luckily, Tom seems mostly 100% recovered! As I’m writing, he’s at the gym!
I did my first run of 2017 (6.1 miles) and when I got back, I was delighted that Cameron wanted to run, too! So, Chloe climbed into the running stroller, I put my shoes back on, and we headed out for a 1.23 mile run at a 12:12 pace! Not bad!
We are still basking in the glow of various family holiday celebrations — the 24th with Cindy and her in-laws, Christmas with my family, and many Hanukkah days with family in LA.
In this first week of the kids’ school vacation, we’ve covered a lot of ground! Not only have we spent a good chunk of days celebrating, we also visited Universal Studios for the first time (grossly crowded–didn’t even make it on a single ride! The Harry Potter ride had a 4-hour wait!) and watched “Moana.” Cameron lost yet another tooth!!
I’m feeling the effects of less time with the kids (due to more time at work)! This week has been such a joy. I loved spending time with them…!
Some representative pictures are below:
Family Pajamas from Lola for Christmas!!! This year, girls and boys (and doggy!) got the same!! Everyone loves these jammies…!
Cryptic puzzle solved! Dylan is really enjoying this mail order mystery!
Silly hat from lola!
Setting out the cookies for Santa.
Christmas Eve love…
Yeah, so this is a picture of our 10-year old…he really does not want to get ramen…so grumpy these days!
This is Dylan’s happy place…! Sometimes, I fret about the time he spends on his computer, but on New Year’s eve, after playing some non-screen games, we did a Minecraft “show and tell,” and I was soooo impressed. He is learning a lot of programming concepts just by “doing.” As an example, he created some complicated command for a command block and said something about how cryptic it probably looks to people. I looked at it and broke that thing down: first word is a command, second thing is an array of arguments being passed into the command and one of those arguments is a JSON object. He was fascinated with the JSON part. He edited the command and showed me the error message, “Invalid JSON…” something or other…and then promptly went back to fix it.
I’m pleased as punch!
Big highlight of first half of winter break: we finally made it to LA for a visit and, as a bonus, we got a family photo.
We didn’t get to see E. much. He got sick so we only saw him on Wednesday evening. He is so big now!
Ok. So here’s another picture of Dylan acting all put-out about being “dragged” to Universal Studios for a picture! He changed his tune quickly, though. And, we’re so glad he loved the experience, in the end!
Here are the big kids at Universal Studios. We love it when they aren’t fighting!
Happiness…
Met a Who! Kids thought the nose was creepy, but were fascinated that make-up could create such a convincing effect!
Met Max!
Chloe’s art on a Buca di Beppo placemat!
