Holiday Recap

Christmas 2014 came and went, as I'm sure you are aware. I don't want to presume anything but neither do I want to insult your intelligence. At least not in print.

I don't know about all the rest of the parents here, but it's always tricky for me not to overdo presents. It's not that I want to, quite the contrary; it's just that it's so much fun picking things out for kids. Especially my kids. They have hardly any standards when it comes to presents. One of Jack's most persistent gift requests over the past couple months has been a planner.

A planner.

Like, the portable calendars adults use to write in their appointments.

Katie decided she wanted a planner too. The excitement in their faces from a $1 Target planner says it all. Consequently, Jack spent the rest of the day (and many of the days after) writing down people's contact info in his planner. My grandma tried not to laugh when Jack asked her, in very serious tones, for her fax and office numbers.

We had the great fortune this Christmas to have two of Matt's brothers (and their lovely wives) join us. His brothers and their families live in New York, Alaska, and Oregon so it's rare that we see them and even rarer to have a few families together at the same time. As a group we decided to meet every couple years and enjoy a week in a rental house somewhere so that all of us can have some time together.

Mark and Emily came for Christmas Eve and Matt and I hosted the traditional Christmas Eve dinner and white elephant gift exchange. One of the gifts was (and here I am not making this item up) a selfie stick. As in a stick you can put your camera on, set the timer, and hold it away from you to take a selfie. 

We tried.

In the end we had Jack take a picture. Sure it's a little blurry but my Grandma and I look like we're beginning a conga line so that's festive.

Every Christmas Eve night, when we put the presents around the tree, Matt always says the same thing: "Are you sure this is enough presents? I remember a ton around our tree as a kid."

And then I assure him that it's plenty and he needs to take into account the fact that he was much shorter as a child so his perception was skewed.

We had a lovely, low key Christmas morning with our apparently mediocre amount of presents. Matt's parents and Mark and Emily came over for breakfast and then we all headed to my parents house.

Matt's oldest (eldest?) brother Andrew flew in that evening with his wife Taryn and their absurdly adorable daughter Eva. We only get to see them about once a year so it was really nice to spend some time with them. One of the great things about Taryn is that she has many talents. One of them is photography. She took some great pictures of all of us and has graciously allowed me to share them here - I promised her I would do my best to give her credit for them. Taryn's also a speech pathologist and I asked her to work with Jack on some speech issues. It's wonderful to be surrounded by talented people. My talents are more in the vein of singing the lines to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song and doing the running man. Sure, it's a little insulting that I'm never asked to share my talents but I try to overlook that in the spirit of Christmas cheer.

Eva is pulling on Jack's glasses and he's just pretending that nothing unusual is happening.

Mom and the daughters-in-law. We group together by hair color, apparently (and volume, as Emily pointed out).

Eva loved nothing more than to poke Tali's face. Tali was not amused. This picture sums it up.

We played games, ate food, traded insults. It was glorious.

Andrew spent a long time playing with Tali, hiding a light up ball behind his back and then throwing it while she squealed with laughter and ran to get it. Cheap entertainment.

Biking is a thing for the males in Matt's family. Matt competed in bike races when he was a teen and even biked across the country at 19. Matt's dad bikes and so does his brother Andrew. Matt's now taking Jack along for shorter rides. They went out a couple times and Andrew taught Jack all about drafting. When I saw these pictures, I wondered if we own stock in spandex. Because if not, we definitely should.

Like most holiday seasons, this one ended with a slight feeling of sadness that all the fun was over. Well, that and stomach flu. Katie got sick at 3 am on New Year's Day at my parents' house. Both the older kids had spent the night eating ungodly amounts of food and staying up to watch the midnight fireworks from my parents' dock. My mom told me that the first thing Kate said after she threw up, in typical Katie fashion, was "Oh no! What treats can I have today now?" She was super concerned she would miss all the good food. After a couple days on the couch, eating saltines and watching movies, Kate recovered and then Noah got sick. I'm not going to go into all the details because if there's anything worse than taking care of children with the stomach flu it's reading blog posts about it.

The odd thing about being a blogger is that you begin to want strange and/or humorous things to happen so you can write about it.

"So nobody is going to flip out at a holiday gathering? I'm not going to find out I'm allergic to something in a humorous way? Come on, people."

I'm sad to say that this holiday was a calm, enjoyable time with family and nothing unusual happened at all. Fingers crossed for Easter!