And, finally, I settled on this as one of the pictures for our holiday card.
These two can bicker, but they also do play well together half of the time!
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my favorite new ornaments
Every year, we get some new additions for our tree. The kids get to pick out a new one every year (my intent is to have them slowly build up their own set of special ornaments for if/when they have their own holiday trees). My favorites are the ones they make!
My mom also has an incredible collection of ornaments she made herself (from kits). They’re all different! These took a lot of work and patience and the kids and I just love them–this was the first year we hung them on our tree. As we pulled each one out of the bag (last Christmas, my mom distributed her collection evenly between my sisters and I), the kids were oohing and ahhing, each one was their expressed favorite until the next one came out!
These are such wonderful treasures! Too bad I can’t do stuff like this. And I sure hope these will make it to the kids’ own trees later on!
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holiday card candidate #3?? plus cookies – 12/22
Ok, Cameron really likes clothes. We were in the laundry room excavating clothes for the day when she spied this very sweet sweater she wanted to wear. It still fit her despite the fact that this was the sweater she wore in last year’s holiday card! Isn’t it cute?
I had the “brilliant” idea of making gingerbread with the kids. Oh wait. No. They requested gingerbread. I knew it would be messy. So, after I took pictures of Cameron, I dragged our activity table into the kitchen area and let ’em at it.
Chloe helped, too! So glad we have an activity table…! They “needed” so much flour.
So much flour!
We didn’t actually get around to the messier part of the project — the decorating — until the next day! Cameron is definitely not a minimalist!
Dylan is now a bit more careful in his designs.
We also ended up decorating Nutter Butter reindeer (accidentally vegan high-fructose syrup product! )
Those chocolate covered pretzels are dangerously good.
I also made some mexican wedding cookies, pecan truffles, and almond toffee bars. When all was said and done, we had a decent plate of stuff for Santa (and to share at Candice’s Christmas Eve gathering and our celebration with HAKT and the Claussens)! Dylan decorated the plate that he had painted last year at Petroglyph and we left it out for Santa. Wise Santa ate the toffee bars and just nibbled on the other stuff. That would have been my choice, for sure!
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dylan’s 2nd grade holiday show – 12/17
Dylan had his little class holiday show in mid-December! It was very cute. The class did a few songs, some in Spanish and they did their performance of the “Little Red Hen”. Dylan was one of the hens (they did all parts as a chorus with the group split up into the various roles; the hen, of course was the main character and there were 4 of them speaking their lines together).
Teacher Laurie had asked that the kids wear something nice and Dylan was super eager to wear his nice new holiday duds from the Gap (I’m stoked to say I got everything at just about 40% off or so!).
If it weren’t for the lights back there, I’d say the backdrop looks like the ones they use for mugshots!
If there’s one thing that Dylan has, it’s enthusiasm! I always appreciate and am in awe of just how happy he is to do stuff! Just today, his piano teacher was also saying that teaching him is such a joy because he’s so enthusiastic!
I forgot! They also danced!
…And, they played music. Good thing I took pictures. My memory is terrible.
After Dylan’s performance, we stopped in and watched the tail end of Taliana’s class show! It was all very sweet. I had a couple of moms tell me that Dylan was the cutest fella in his group. We thought so, too. 🙂
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cookie party at nate and camille’s – 12/15
The following weekend, we got to see Nate, Camille, Todd and Kathleen at their holiday cookie party! It’s always so sweet to see the kids together.
The little girls got along great! They had a tea party and “slept” in Camille’s bed!
We feel so fortunate to have so many wonderful folks in our lives!
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my company holiday party – 12/14
The second weekend of December, we attended my company holiday party–always such a fantastically fun experience for the kids. And, they always get exactly what they ask for from Santa!
They also have this awesome guy named Gideon who does the most amazing balloon art for kids! This year, he made Hello Kitty for Chloe, Ariel for Cameron, and a monkey in a coconut tree for Dylan!
This is one event where I don’t actually limit what the kids eat. We just let them at it!
The two big kids worked on gingerbread houses…Chloe nibbled away at them!
The big kids ignored their presents for a loooong time! They were having too much fun making ornaments, doing gingerbread, etc. But, they eventually got back to them.
Clearly, Tom helped!
Who knows if I’ll be there next year, but for the sake of holiday kid fun, I sure hope I am!
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homespun train rides – 12/12
Dylan still cobbles together trains out of whatever vehicles he can find and binds them together with whatever strings, ribbons, bungees, etc. are around!
It’s fun to watch them have so much fun!
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tom’s first marathon – 12/8
The second weekend of December continued to be busy. My dear friend Jenny was celebrating her 40th and Tom had his first marathon!
In order to do both, Tom left for Sacramento early Saturday, taking a bus and then the train and dear Heather babysat the three kids later in the evening so that I could attend Jenny’s bday dinner at Soif Wine Bar.
Jenny and I have been running together regularly for going on a couple of years (??) now. Her son Kaden is exactly 7 days younger than Cameron and her daughter Julie is just a couple of months younger than Dylan.
Being such a good buddy, I didn’t want to miss her big milestone bday celebration. It was just too bad that Tom couldn’t join us! (Jenny, by the way, is the gal in red).
Equally important, though, was supporting Tom in his first marathon, so once dinner wrapped up, I picked up the kids from Heather’s and the 4 of us made the long journey to Sacramento.
Poor Tom had to be awakened from his slumber at about 11:30pm (when we arrived) so that he could help me haul the kids in–not ideal for someone needing to wake up at 5am for a 26.2 mile run!
It was freezing (mid 20F) as we were in the middle of the cold snap that hit in that first week of December! It was sooo cold, I was reluctant to take the kids to the finish line tooooo early. They had blankets to wrap around them and all but Cameron had heavy jackets (she refused to get one when we bought Dylan’s), but it was still so cold.
Instead, I bided some time with them having a hugely expensive breakfast in the hotel restaurant before finally deciding we needed to head out to meet Tom at the finish.
We were slowed by several stops along the way to adjust blankets and such (and poor Cameron was just so cold even with Tom’s jacket and blankets draped over her)! And……..we missed him! We were expecting a 4-hour finish, but he finished in 3:58, so by the time we got to the final stretch, he’d already crossed the finish line.
We spent the next 30-60 minutes trying to find each other….
In the meantime, I snapped a shot of the Capitol building. I hadn’t been back to this place since I attended a protest here way back in the 90’s! I tried to tell the kids that this was the state capitol, etc, but they were so cold, they really could care less (of course, warm weather may not have made much of a difference)!
After checking out of the hotel, Tom was still able to hobble around town with us so we checked out the historical downtown area which, happily, had The Most Awesome Train Museum ever.
This place had real trains and train cars inside!
We had to split up because Cameron was so unhappy from the cold and tired from the previous night’s lateness, that she initially didn’t want to go into the museum.
I found this Railroad Time blurb to be of particular interest. It turns out that timezones were a result of train operations needing a standard timetable for coordinating travel!
Another super interesting tidbit was that brewing coffee was a mandatory component of crew training! While Dylan and I were in the mail car, a docent explained how they used a steam valve to quickly heat canned food (and water for coffee). He described it as their “microwave”!
We did finally hook up with Cameron and Tom. We all went through the dining and sleepign cars together before heading upstairs to play with the toy trains for a few minutes.
Before heading home, we had a nice dinner and paused to watch a holiday light show.
There is actually quite a lot of interesting things to do in Sacto which leaves us something to look forward to–I think we will return here so that Tom can finish his “unfinished business” here! (He had a good marathon time, but apparently he bonked on mile 20 and walked much of the remaining 10k so he is hoping to improve on this next year!)
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more holiday card photo candidates
“New” dress from Taliana! She loved it so much, she kept on wanting to wear it!
This interest in dressing up fancy, by the way, was the direct result of having seen a local production of the Nutcracker Ballet! We saw the performance as part of Taliana’s bday celebration. Cameron loved all of the dresses…and, reminded of Rocky, she also expressed an interest in beginning ballet. She kept whispering in my ear that she wanted to start lessons “tomorrow!”
Well, we can’t start quite that immediatley, but we have enrolled her in a pre-ballet class starting at the end of this month!
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