Holidays, 99.2% Great Times, & lots of "Air Quotes"!

Hi there!

Hope your holiday season was as much fun as ours was (though, we're well past many other holidays now compared to the "official" season...oh well, keeping above water as best we can).

We spent Christmas at "home" ... though not much of it was in the walls of our house. Tante Ness, Uncle Tanner, and F visited from Anchorage and so there were meals and events galore. From Sharks games to skating in the park to holiday train rides, we packed it full. And, yes, there was a matching pajama day too! Sprinkle in a mother/son dance and a father/daughter date + a birthday party or two + work travel and you have a very, very full agenda.

And as the cherry on top, we went to Disneyland right after New Year's for a few days.  The weather was great and though there were a "few" other people with the same idea of hitting the happiest place on Earth, we had 99.2% the best time in the world (chalk 0.5% up to exhaustion and walking 10-11 miles per day with 40,000 other people and getting 4 hours of sleep a night)...oh and for those of you doing the math, the other 0.3% was a quick trip to the ER (nothing too dramatic, just wanted to get something looked at so as to make sure the rest of the trip went smoothly -- trust me, you don't want to know the specifics). But yes, everyone is fine and J got a brand new Doug the Dog (complete with a vet cone of shame) out of the experience.

For me, the best part of the trip was that the kiddos were tall enough to ride some of the big kid rides AND they really enjoyed them. Actually, enjoyed is the wrong word...LOVED them is more accurate. E and I rode Space Mountain 4 times! J + her "tall" shoes got us on Thunder Mountain (2-3 times), Radiator Springs Racers, and Star Tours. Of course, we hit a number of the old time favorites: Tractors, Dancing Cars, Finding Nemo, Autopia, Bugs Land. We hit up Ariel's Grotto for a Princess Lunch for the first time (and last, since they closed it Jan 7th for something new coming soon). I love having kids -- I love even more having kids that have reached my threshold and now like to do many of the things that I do. I can only hope that they don't start getting more mature than me.

We did have a loss in the family after the holidays. Uncle Reed (one of Opa's cousins) passed away. It had been a slow decline over the last couple years, but painful to have him gone regardless. He was one of the most sincerely nice men I've ever met. He literally asked about my parents, my grandma (when she was still with us), my job, my writing, and my overall status of life each time I saw him -- even at Christmas when his health was fading, his concern for an extended relative was at the forefront of his mind. He always had something special for the kids too, and the man made the best fudge ever, so he was a big hit in the kid's book for that reason alone. In the end, he was with the people he was closest to -- though all the people who loved him would've filled the entire city block and more.

Beyond all the activity and the loss of Reed, the kids are 99.2% a blast (give or take). J is definitely a personality when she wants to be -- and can melt my heart with a single, eerily well-timed hug. She went from being a bumbling toddler to being able to have these long, involved conversations on just about anything. And I can't tell you how much I love seeing her caring for Bailey and her deep love of the furry buddy. She's still loving ballet, tap, swimming, preschool, and gymnastics. Also, she makes me copy E's homework every week so that she can do it as well. Not sure if that's a girl thing or a her thing or what, but it's odd and good and sorta scares me too.

E is so much fun too. He's loving school and really is blooming there. And it's wild to see him learning to read and do math and understand the basics of science. I can't believe how much they do in Kindergarten these days -- I remember it as more of a half-day recess. Also, I love seeing how much he thinks about things. One of my favorite stories about him recently is that he was at dinner and asked Lisa why they were called 'waiters', since "I'm the one waiting!"

One other fun thing that we've been doing is that the kids decided they wanted to start a business so we spent most of the last couple of weekends with that..what is it, you ask —wait for it— soap making. So spending lots of time with them making soaps, trying to explain pricing strategy via stick figures, packaging, teaching how to count money, sitting out on the corner. They’ve made a surprising $$ in revenue so far (more than my writing career has made) even if they’re so damn cute and most of it is family and friends. Totally proud of them. They also decided 50% profits go to the "kids save the rain forest" (which they learned about on our recent trip to Costa Rica -- post coming soon) and the other half to getting more soap supplies and molds and things. And if it’s not obvious, I’m pretty proud even if it makes our kitchen that much more of a disaster. 

Anyhow, I'll let the pictures and linked slideshows "tell" the rest of the stories. Hope y'all are at least 99.2% happy!