Whirlwind Holidays

Whew! Is it 2012 already?!

December has flown by thanks to a madcap roller coaster of holidays. First off, our little girl Tessa turned 2 years old on December 14th...all with rather minimal fanfare. Since she probably wouldn't register the significance of the date, Kate and I decided to keep things low-key. We got her a present (and got a couple more from aunts in the mail) but didn't do anything more than that. She seemed okay with it.

We tried to get baking and Christmas cards out before the holidays but that just didn't happen. Somehow the month just got away from us. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

We ended up heading down to Colorado Springs to spend Christmas weekend with my family. My mother brought the whole lot us into her restaurant - Thai Eats - for a smorgasbord of both Thai and all-American cuisine.
It was also a joint birthday party of Tessa and her cousin Everest (whose birthday is Dec 31st). Tessa of course loved the cookie-http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifcake she got from Grandma and even managed to blow out her own two candles!
The birthday kids opened a couple of presents and generally played around the whole night. The grown-ups ate too much. :-)

Christmas Day was more laid-back than I was expecting. Kate and I went to morning services at St Gabriel's then came back to my folks' home to chill for part of the day before jumping into prep for Christmas dinner. Kate did the ham and rolls while I did potatoes and gravy. Mom tackled green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, and stuffing. Dianna and her family joined us later in the afternoon, with Dianna bringing over some dessert.

After dinner, we let the kids open up presents. It was kind of different being the grown-up parent watching the kids lay into their Christmas presents. I think it was the first Christmas where I felt like my parents must have felt when Dianna and I were younger. Sure, we had our own gifts but it was much more fun to just lean back and watch the children go at it. I think I took another step toward real adult parenthood!

Incidentally, Tessa really, really enjoyed tearing open Christmas wrapping! Big surprise there, huh?
The day after Christmas, Kate and I headed up to Denver, where we met up with Kate's siblings - Emily, Glynnis, Aileen, and Dan - at Emily and Jason's place. We enjoyed a second round of Christmas dinner and once more stuffed ourselves silly.

That evening, we traded presents around...and Tessa once again did her duty in distributing gifts to appropriate folks.And she once again had fun ripping open her own presents.


I should note that Tessa did pretty well for herself - between belated birthday presents and Christmas. In fact, we had to leave some gifts behind both in Colorado Springs and in Denver because there simply wasn't enough space in the car for all her new toys!
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
I started back at work the next day while Kate and Tessa bounced between home and Denver, hanging out with Tessa's aunts and uncles. Kate's sibling came up on Wednesday to help us get started on our repainting projechttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gift for the first floor of our house. That's right - the infamous purple wall is going, going gone!http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

To thank them for their hard work, Kate and I took Dan and the sisters to Beaujo's Pizza for dinner.

The next day after I got off work, I joined the family back in Denver for dinner at Larkburger and then our first ever visit to the Denver Zoo's Zoo Lights. The Zoo Lights were amazing! The creativity and artistry was great and even Tessa was noticing the various glowing, glittering animal shapes all around us. There were even a few animals out seeing visitors, including the mountain goats, giraffes, and Tessa's favorite: the Tropical Discovery house. I highly recommend Zoo Lights to anyone in the Denver area around the holidays.
Kate spent a little time on Friday with her siblings, seeing Dan and Aileen off before picking me up from work in Longmont. Friday night was kind of a gasp-for-breath sort of night where we did some clean-up and a little prep for New Year's Eve.

New Year's Eve was spent over at my friends Bill and Tammy's house, as if often our tradition. It was a modest turn-out, around seven or eight of us not counting two kiddos. Bill made a turkey stew and Kate and I brought plenty of fruits and veggies. We played a few games...and nursed an exhausted Tessa all the way to midnight. We didn't stick around much longer than the changing of the year, hastening home to put our little girl and ourselves to bed.

Fortunately I had the next two days off from work...which was great because not only did we need a recovery from the whirlwind, but all three of us had developed a bit of sinus, sore throat, and coughing problem. We spent the first day of the year either sleeping or just plodding along. The second day was a little more productive but we were still recovering. By this post, I'm feeling quite a bit better, though Kate is still coughing and Tessa is still a bit stuffed up. Hopefully we'll be recovering soon enough.

So...wow! What a lot of holiday crammed into a couple of weeks, especially there at the end. Don't get me wrong - we had a great time...but now we need the proverbial vacation from our vacation! :-)


Happy Holidays! Welcome to 2012! With any luck, we won't all be so busy that we miss this year too!

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you have a great day!

Bad Habits: 1; New Years Resolutions: 0

One of my resolutions for 2011 was to be better about posting on this blog. Not that I have a massive following or anything, but I just feel guilty if I leave for long periods of time (like I have). And naturally, since I'm inherently lazy and forgetful, I've still managed to neglect this blog. I'm still pretty up on my Twitter feeds (as you can see from up above), but most folks that would be remotely interested in the vaguest sense in what's going on in my life aren't on Twitter.

I think one of the problems is that I still have it in my head that I need to post long stretches of prose and/or pictures in my blog....y'know, make it worth the reader's time to visit. That's probably ridiculous - I've seen plenty of popular blogs that don't contain novellas or photo albums with each post. I obviously need to get used to the idea of toning myself down.

Secondly, I admit that I find Twitter and Facebook easier for my quick, day-to-day updates and announcements, especially the latter. A lot of my friends and family are connected to me on Facebook so a quick update or upload of pictures/videos there catches almost everyone I need.

Lastly, I am really busy these days. Between work at the Longmont Library, the long commute (via car or public bus), and a occasionally demanding one-year old at home, I don't get a lot of time to devote to my online affectations. I suppose it's probably good that I don't consider blogging more important than work and family, but it does cut into the time.

Anyway, I guess that's my weedy first post for the 2011 year. Let's see what I can do to keep up on the regular updates here. No promises on fine bits of prose or award-winning photographer at each post. Maybe I'll just stick to a comment or three about what's going on in my life at the time.

At least for those times when I can't sum up my existence in 140 characters. :-)

As always, thanks for reading. Hope you're having a great day.

Holiday Summary

Wow - those two weeks of holidays really take it out of you, huh? It seemed to take the rest of this last week for me to feel like I was back into the "normal" routine of things. :-)

Christmas was a lot of fun. My family was able to make it up on Christmas Eve as planned and stayed through Friday morning. Here's a quick picture-based summary...

Here are those promised shots of the Christmas tree. First, the pre-decorations...



Then the cats sniffing around curiously...



Then the finished product!




The meal that Kate and I made for my family on Christmas Eve...we were going to take them out to eat, but every place was closed early. Fair enough, says I!



On Christmas Day, we got to work opening presents! I think Julie and Everest had the most fun of all! :-)






Emily and Jason were able to make it up for dinner - which Julie was a very good helper in the kitchen with her Aunt Kate.



The whole crew!



After playing my new game called Last Word, we called it a night, with Emily and Jason heading back down to Denver, while Heath and Dianna stayed up a little with us to chat and play my other new game SceneIt - Movie Edition. (Thanks, Emily!)

The next morning Kate made breakfast for everyone - blueberry pancakes in fact - and my family returned home to Colorado Springs shortly afterward. I also had to head out to work for the afternoon and we all sort of collapsed in our respective heaps come the evening.

On Saturday, Kate and I took a trip down to Longmont to visit the Longmont Museum and Cultural Center - and so I can show her around my workplace at the Longmont Library. We finished with dinner at the Olive Garden.

On Sunday, after a lazy afternoon, we joined some friends at the Stonehouse Grille for a bout of Geeks Who Drink trivia. To my surprise, my old chum Matt and his wife had stopped back in Fort Collins for a visit. Bill, Tammy, Ron, and Arne were also all there and we had ourselves a darn good time.



In fact, the team consisting of me, Kate, Ron, and Arne came in second place for the night. We called ourselves "Distracted by Shiny." :-)

For New Year's Eve, Kate and I joined Bill and Tammy at their place (joined by Ron and another friend Ben) to ring in the new year. For a chunk of the night, the boys went upstairs to play some Nintendo Wii while the girls played an entire game of Seasons.

(We probably should have quit playing Wii earlier than we did - but some of us got addicted really fast!) ;-)

Whew! So that's the rapid fire recap of how our 2008 holiday season went. We had a good couple of weeks and we hope that everyone reading this had the same. The holidays can be draining at times but they never fail to be a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone who shared in the season with us!

As always, thanks for reading. Hope you're having a great day!