Happy Holidays & Happy Birthday

Remember Christmas?  Yeah, me neither.  Luckily I do have a few pics to jog my memory.

The holiday season started a few days after our return from Sayulita - December 6th,  when Grambo St. Nicholas fills up the stockings with all kinds of yummy treats.  (I don't know how I wound up with kids who consider black licorice a treat, rather than a punishment, but I guess that's their German genes kicking in.)

Lucie was so excited about her stocking she had to hug it.

The kids got an extra holiday on December 11th - Pineapple Express Day.  The weather predictions for the big rainstorm were so dire that the district preemptively closed the schools, so Daddy stayed home while Mommy went to work.  Half the city lost power - the half that Mommy was in, spending the morning examining animals by flashlight, calling clients on her cell phone, and cursing our recent transition to electronic medical records.  Back at the ranch, lights/cable/internet were operational, and everyone went next door to play with Beck & Willow.  I hear Daddy & Yinlan waited until a very reasonable 12 or so to open the wine.

If it's not hard enough to practice snowboard turns on the Quirky, just add booze and roughly 80 lbs of wiggly kid for a little extra challenge...

Our next big event was Lucie's 4th Birthday!  We had our first Montessori Celebration of Life:  for each year of her life, we read a little bit about what she did that year, then Lucie carried the globe around "the Sun" (a candle burning on floor of a preschool, which I can't believe has never gone horribly awry) while the kids sing "the Earth goes around the Sun, the Earth goes around the Sun, it takes a year to make the trip, the Earth goes around the Sun".  Then there were cookies.

She was very proud.

She got lots of great presents - the hot tickets this year are horses and art, in case anyone was worried that her resemblance to me as a child is limited to her physical appearance.  She was especially excited to get her very own easel.  (And Mommy got a little bonus gift:  Daddy's most disgusting t-shirt retired and now is enjoying an encore career as an art smock)

Winter Break lasts 2 weeks - even with Christmas, New Year's Day, and 4 days of YMCA camp, that still leaves a few days to fill.  On Dec. 24th, I fell victim to temporary insanity and took the kids ice-skating at Union Square.

OK, maybe not temporary insanity, but I honestly don't know what I was thinking.  Growing up in Michigan, I learned to skate pretty young - young enough that I have no clear memories of learning to do it.  ALSO, I have not actually been ice skating in a number of years.  So hopefully I can be forgiven for thinking, "Oh, I can hold their hands and help them around...."

Not exactly.  It was more along the lines of "I can hold one up under his/her arms and skate while the other one clings to the rail until I return, at which point I hold that one up under the arms and skate him/her to spot on the rail where I left the first one".  Turns out skipping the gym that morning was completely justified.  And it was actually kind of fun anyway.  We capped it off with a nice lunch at Cafe Nordstrom

Lucie was pretty wiped out from our big day downtown, so it wasn't too hard to convince her to sleep so Santa could visit.

But Brennan thought pretending to be asleep would do the trick.

Christmas Day arrived, and before I could finish my coffee, the living room floor was a sea of wrapping paper.

After several hours of lego building, painting, making sticker mosaics, and light-saber battles, we did manage to pry them out of the house for a spell at the playground.

Winter Break also gave us the opportunity to go to the movies  ("Big Hero 6" was actually pretty good) and visit some of favorite spots.  Now that Lucie is 4, she was able to check out one of Brennan's new favorites - the planetarium at the California Academy.  The kids loved watching the big space show, and Mommy discovered that sitting in a dark room while Jody Foster soothingly narrates the history of the cosmos is a perfect recipe for a great power nap.  We also went to the zoo for their holiday lights event, which turned out to be way more "playground at night" and less "zoo" than I expected.

Lucie also had her first real birthday party - we took some friends to Build-a-Bear, as Lucie has been harboring hurt feelings that Brennan went to one without her.  (Never mind that it was July 2010, Brennan was almost 2, and she hadn't been born yet.)  Bear-and-reindeer building was followed by lunch at The Cheesecake Factory up on the 8th floor of the Macy's Building.  Highlights included 6 identical orders of kids' mini-corndogs, and a rooftop patio and view of Union Square that seems completely too fantastic for The Cheesecake Factory.  

Eventually, January 5th rolled around, and to everyones' relief disappointment, it was Back to School.  Time to take down the tree, put the mistletoe in the compost bin, and pack up the stockings -