Christmas - Part 1

There is A LOT to report, so I'm breaking our Christmas celebrations up in to two parts; this is part one.

On Christmas Eve we rolled our traditional homemade sushi - nothing says Merry Christmas like sushi! I have these cool chop sticks that are connected by a rubber man on the top and I'm getting pretty good at them. The crunchy shrimp were the easiest to pick up, but I even attempted the salmon! 

I dictated my letter to Santa to my mom and she wrote it down for me.  I think I did pretty good because A) Santa left me a cookie, B) My dad got a pj shirt, C) My friend Poppy - aka Popster - got a guitar, and D) I got a candy cane - even though I don't like them.

 Christmas morning I ran into the front room to find this...a REALLY loud and fast race track that shoots cars and they smash into each other.

I made my dad a gift for Christmas. My mom let me wrap it myself. I used an entire roll of tape to make sure it stayed shut.

 Ta-da! It's a Christmas tree painted with MY hand prints. Pretty cool, I know.

 My mom got a bunch of stuff and is showing some of it off here - a new hat, a vest, and a cool book she can read to me.

 Christmas afternoon we went over to the Keenan's house for the "Running of the Children." Aunt Chris hides Christmas pictures down the path and we run as fast as we can and try and find them. After we exhaust ourselves running, we return to their house and get a chocolate treat as a prize. I think I ran more than anyone...

 Aunt Chris made me a race track out of a gigantic piece of felt. She even got a spice rack for my "watcher" cars to hang out in the grandstand as the "racer" cars zoomed by. She's awesome.

And this is just "Part One" - stay tuned for Christmas - Part 2!

Tis the Season

We've been enjoying December and all of the Christmas fun it brings with it. I'm not too into Santa Claus this year and if you ask me what I want for Christmas, I'll tell you a candy cane. So really, with just a candy cane on my wish list, I don't have any need to sit on the lap of a big stranger who's dressed in red fur and makes loud laughing noises. Don't get me wrong, I've seen him a bunch this month - at the neighborhood Christmas party I walked by and accepted a candy cane and in San Francisco I walked up, gave him a high five and again, accepted a candy cane.

So when my parents had an idea of visiting his workshop at the National Christmas Tree, I said, "no thank you." But my mom reminded me there are three people in our family and that SHE wanted to stop in the workshop; so I obliged. I did state aloud, "I won't go near Santa if he says, 'Ho Ho Ho'." Really, is that necessary? But as we walked through the workshop and checked out all of the cool stuff, I suddenly felt a bit brave. As we approached Santa and my parents offered to have me walk past, I said, "I'll stand on the step." And then before I knew it, the big guy scooped me up and plopped me on his lap - TRICKY! No words were exchanged, but he gave me that look that he knew the candy cane was on my list so I think we're good.

Last night we had friends over to go caroling. Unfortunately rain started falling about 10 minutes before we were to start strolling the neighborhood. So we all grabbed a Christmas hat and an instrument and decided we could have a sing-a-long indoors. I chose the ever popular "Christmas helmet" for my hat and the popular "Christmas maracas" for my instrument. Each kid also got to pick their favorite Christmas carol - jingle bells, frosty, etc. I picked the internationally, well-known ABC song. So while it doesn't exactly mention Christmas, every letter in the song is needed to spell all of the Christmas words - so there, don't judge. And besides, it was one of the only songs everyone knew all of the words too. It turned out to be a great night with lots of holiday cheer!

 

My Parents' Rivalry

My parents are pretty supportive of each other UNLESS the San Francisco 49ers are playing the Miami Dolphins and then, well, it's every man for himself. Luckily this only happens once every four years. This last weekend was "once every four years," so we flew to San Francisco for the game. (Four years ago they flew to Miami - at least those are two pretty good places regardless of the outcome, right?!)

We made a weekend out of it and had a great time seeing friends and San Francisco all decorated for Christmas. Here are some of the highlights....

On the first morning I decided to get up at 5am - hey, it was 8am DC time. So we headed to the Golden Gate Bridge so I could run and run and run (and besides, it was the only thing open that early!) Their jumping was a bit out of sync - maybe because it was so early....

 

 Then down to the Wharf and Pier 39 to enjoy the decorations, the sea lions, and meet up with friends.

Saturday night we went to Union Square with Lisa and Josh - they're awesome.

Sunday was the big game. I was given a choice and chose to wear my 49ers t-shirt on top of my Dolphins t-shirt (sorry dad, the Niners are having a solid season). We tailgated with the Brills; I was the shortest tailgater.

Then inside for the game. Our seats were awesome - my mom said something about spending all of my college money to buy them. That's okay, who needs college when you can watch football from the front row!

Slow first half and then the game got really exciting. The best part was all of the action happened at our end of the field. I zonked out in the 4th quarter but woke up to tell my dad, "The Niners won, the Dolphins did not." He seemed to already know this and didn't need it repeated. My mom however seemed surprised by this information and ask me to say it over and over and over again. Go Niners!

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Here's the annual posting of me and my little red wagon. The wagon is TINY. And when I was born, I could fit inside of it, which is hard to believe because my dad's hand is almost too big for it. Just three year's later, I tower over it. It's a great way to determine my growth. The doc says I'm now in the 17% for my height (that doesn't count my hair height) and 75% for my weight - so i've "grown" in both. Let's hope the height number goes up more this year than the weight!

 

Aruba, Jamaica, oooo I Wanna Take ya

Merry Christmas to us! Thanks to Grandma and Grandpa, the ten of us enjoyed an early Christmas present and took a family cruise. We headed south to Florida, jumped on a boat, and then just kept going; we went so far south we almost hit Venezuela! We stopped at three islands, Aruba, Curasao, and Princess Kays.

It was a week of non-stop fun - having three awesome cousins to play with was THE BEST! We played mini golf, ping pong, shuffle board, basketball, ate, swam, went to the water slides, snorkeled, dug giant holes in the sand, ate, rode water bikes, fed ostriches, ate, and ate.

My dad won the ship's basketball tournament and my mom won the ship's longest drive golf challenge. And me, I ate a lot of ice cream. 

I practiced a lot of ping pong during the week and what I learned is the ball is very tiny and hard to hit. For a while I used two paddles and just spun around like a tornado. After smashing into the table and hitting myself in the head with a paddle, I decided that wasn't my smartest idea. Maybe if the table were just a little bit shorter.... 

The ostrich farm was awesome. We got to feed them, stand on an egg (did you know the egg won't break even with 300 pounds on top of it - geez!, and get close to a crocodile. We even celebrated my birthday again (and again, and again!)

There is no way to sum up all of the fun we had but my Uncle Rick put this awesome video together with highlights from the trip, check it out: http://vimeo.com/54267549 - Thanks Grandma and Grandpa for the awesome Christmas present and the endless memories!

The Beginning of Three

Three has begun, or at least the celebration of me turning three. Having a birthday on November 30th means the party begins early and doesn't stop until December 1st. Both of my parents have birthdays near Christmas (Jan 4 and 16th), so they are highly sensitive to having your birthday smashed with Christmas. They are very kind in this area and make sure I get a "Happy Birthday" party and not a "Happy Thanksbirthday" party.

For this reason, we had my official birthday party yesterday, even though by actual birth date isn't for another two weeks. So you may see another post with birthday pictures near the real thing, but for now, here are some from the celebration. Oh, and as you might have been able to guess, it was a car party....

 

 We painted cars

 We raced cars

 The winner won a Piston Cup

 We ate "spare tires"

 We threw balls into the tire

 And we had a car parade 

So far, three is looking pretty good!

Happy Halloween!

The Halloween festivities began with our family hosting the church Halloween party on Friday night. We had a lot of fun and people's costumes were awesome! Some worth noting included my buddy Hazel dressed as a fairy with toothbrushes sew to her dress...the Tooth Fairy! and the Zobrists came as chefs and put their one year old son in a giant stove pot dressed as a lobster - hilarious! And a couple that is expecting a baby came as a 70's guy and she was a disco ball, with the ball on her belly. So clever. I, as you can see, was a football player. The "clever" part of my costume was my parents - they dressed as NFL replacement referees.

Then Hurricane Sandy hit the area and we were very lucky. We lost power for three days, but our house wasn't impacted and all of us were safe. The tricky part was not having power for Halloween. So we lit our yard with our car headlights and lots of jack-o-lanterns and wa-la - trick-or-treaters appeared! We had just over 300 kids this year, (less than our usual 450-500 trick-or-treaters, but respectable for a house without power).

The Keenans hooked us up with a new addition to our yard - this skeleton, and he has a light up head. The best part about his head, it's battery operated, so it worked without electricity! Very cool. I figured out Halloween this year. Knock on a door, say, "Trick-or-treat," get a candy, say, "thank you," and repeat. I am definitely a fan of this holiday...and repeat.