the holidays

We enjoyed a fairly quiet, lowkey holiday season. The reality of heading back to work and life as normal tomorrow is slapping me in the face tonight. I'm not at all happy about having to get up early again. It's been so nice to have so much family time over the last couple of weeks!

The kids got many nice gifts. L especially was thrilled to receive a pink Nintendo DS from my overly generous friend, Orinda. She was so surprised, as we've held a hard line on the 'no video game' line. O. checked with us first, and we decided to let her get one but to get only educational games for it. O also got her a game to go with it, and she's been loving it! It is a very educational game with lots of puzzles, and she's had so much fun trying to figure each of the puzzles out.

She was also really happy on xmas morning to find that Santa had yet again gotten her a gift her parents had told her she couldn't have--a 'sea monster' set. So far we have a few of the little buggers swimming around in there, but she put a ton of eggs in there that didn't seem to hatch. Their life cycle is only around 16-20 days, though when Dej used to do sea monkeys, they didn't seem to live nearly that long. We were careful about following all of the directions, but they RARELY lived past two weeks.

We stuck with all of our standard holiday traditions, with one slight alteration. Instead of our usual xmas eve butterballs, I decided to go wild and make grasshoppers instead. It's been probably 20 years since I've had a grasshopper. They were as good as I remembered them, and they were fine with soy ice cream (I wasn't totally sure it would work).

Dej had her first 'grown up' xmas this year. The vast majority of the gifts we got her were household items. She seemed happy with everything. I know it was all stuff she needed and will use, but I hope she wasn't disappointed by getting almost all practical gifts.

I think we are all (the B side of the familly) really happy with doing something fun together instead of buying/accumulating more stuff. Last year we all went to see Stomp. This year we will be going to an event together next month. I can't say what it is yet, because M wants it to be a surprise for L.

We got together on NYE as usual and ate, hung out, and played games.

Whenever we got the chance on NYE/NY, the girls and I watched the Twilight Zone marathon. That's always been one of our favorite parts of the holiday!