Christmas in Ohio

The trip to Ohio is always hard, for these main reasons:
1.  We have to pack so much stuff.
2.  It's a long drive.
3.  We have to manage Alice in a different setting.
4.  Alice doesn't eat very well when we travel due to different food and distractions.
5.  The kids (and therefore parents) don't sleep as well at night, especially with all of us in one room.

Nevertheless, twice a year we slog north to visit the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.   Alice may be high-maintenance the whole time, but she has a lot of new experiences that are quite valuable.  Plus, there is the added benefit that she can try some things we normally wouldn't have her do (like eat candy or sit on the counter eating chips) and she won't expect that to become part of the normal pattern at home. Alice always seems to come back a new person, having been stretched by being in a new environment and around different people for a week.

Alice loves Christmas trees and ornaments.

Simon enjoyed looking at things in a new house.

Alice unwrapping her yellow rake

Alice gets a little help from Simon in opening a present.

Simon enjoying Christmas morning on grandma's lap

Alice passed out the presents and helped open all of them

Handsome men!

Alice stirs her instant oatmeal with her new whisk

Alice tries out every one of grandma's pens

Alice enjoying her current favorite activity: reading books

Simon enjoying a snooze on Don

Packing up for the next house!

Alice enjoys a bike ride around the neighborhood

Grandma and Grandpa help Alice ride up the hill

Alice eats some twizzlers for the first time.  She really liked them.

Aunt Liz makes Simon laugh

Alice liked sitting in the little chair for bedtime stories

Youngest and Oldest cousin

Alice doing art with Kaelyn

The children are our future

Simon smiles at Braeden

Uncle Tener and Aunt Liz read to Alice

Alice and Kaelyn doing art

Taesen and Simon

Alice is the teacher's pet

Bedtime stories with the cousins

Happy about having pizza for breakfast

Kaelyn did a great job playing with Simon

Back home, Alice helped unpack the presents and hand-me-downs.  Here she has on one sparkly pink shoe from Kaelyn and one yellow sneaker from Braeden.  I'm probably reading too much into the shoes, but I think this really represents Alice.  She likes girly things and boy things, and she wants everything at once.

Now that she is so much more verbal, we can get a better sense of what impacted her the most during the trip.  Here are the highlights:

She talked a lot about Mater (a character from Cars that she loves) being in Kaelyn and Braeden's basement.

She talked a lot about basements in general, since two of the houses we stayed in had basements where fun things happened.

She demanded to do art (having had much fun doing art with Kaelyn).

She felt entitled to use our pens from the pen container on the counter since she was able to do that at grandma Cam's house.

She talked a lot about going canoeing with grandpa Shogren.

She was thrilled to see the ornaments grandma Cam gave us on our tree at home.

She wants to sit on my lap in the van (because we did that in a parking lot at a rest stop on the drive).

All in all, the trip was a lot of work, but so much fun.  It was just too bad that Alice was sick the first part and Simon was sick the second part.

Rolling around

Exploring

Simon has been more interested in examining his toys lately.  

80 degrees here today, and Simon and I took a lovely walk. 

Christmas with the Arcaro-Burbridges

We used to stop by Tom's house on the way to Ohio to open gifts, but with the kids now, our trip is interminable so we don't have time to stop in the morning anymore. So we started another new tradition of getting together on the weekend before Christmas.

Opening presents.

The aftermath: no one playing with the toys they just got.

Alice eating lunch at the kids' table.

Simon: Two can play at this game, Grandpa!

Mia realizing that Alice wants her to read every book in the house to her.

Nothing sweeter than a sleeping baby.

Solstice Celebration

Since this is the first year Alice is really aware of things, we've put a little more effort into thinking about the holidays and what family traditions to have.  Christmas has presented two main things to think about: Santa Claus and Christmas Morning.  We decided to just be vague on Santa this year.  I said I didn't want Santa to get credit for presents we picked out for Alice, and Zac took the high ground and said he just didn't want to lie to Alice.  So although she is really into Santa, he's just like any other pervasive story book character right now.

Christmas Morning presented a problem because we are always in Ohio for Christmas day, but we wanted to have our own family Christmas, since it didn't really make sense to wrap presents for the kids and haul them to Ohio to be unwrapped then hauled back to NC.  The solution for this year, which may become a sort of tradition, was to celebrate our family Christmas on the winter solstice.  It was a nod to our being atheists, but also it worked out because it was a Saturday.

Before the day, I thought about what traditions we might have and how to make the day special.  Obviously we'd open presents in the morning, but what about the rest?  My main goals were to make the day as fun as possible with none of the normal weekend work like laundry, cooking, and cleaning.

First, I thought of breakfast.  We should have a special breakfast, something we rarely have.  I thought cinnamon rolls would be good, because I love them but never bake them.  The idea was that the tradition would be to make the dough the night before with the kids, and bake them in the morning.  Since this is a rough year and we were planning rather last minute, we decided that cinnamon rolls from a canister would be fine.

I didn't know what to expect for the present opening part.  Alice is very interested in opening presents, but for her birthday six months ago she just opened the first one and wanted to play with it and didn't have much interest in opening the other presents.  So I was prepared for an all-day affair.  Zac also had the good idea that it might set a bad precedent if Alice got to open all the presents under the tree and they were all for her.  So amongst her presents, we also put some for Zac's siblings (to be opened the next day), so that Alice would learn that everything wasn't for her and that she had to look at the name on the present and see if it was for her.  Simon also had two presents.

Since the weather was going to be nice (70s!) I thought it would be fun to go do something outside in the afternoon, but if for some reason it didn't work out, that would be ok.  We picked the North Carolina Museum of Art park for the place to go, since we hadn't taken Alice there in a while.

Then, for the evening, I thought it would be fun to go out to eat.  There is a new restaurant right by our house that I walked by the other evening, and it seemed almost magical that there was a place where other people cooked food for you.  The place just exuded happiness.  I thought it would be so nice to have a day where we didn't have to spend one second preparing supper or cleaning up afterwards.  And, since our family Christmas wasn't actually on Christmas, it didn't seem depressing or sacrilegious to go out to eat.  It seemed like a brilliant idea.

And to end the day, I wanted us to go on a walk that evening to look at Christmas lights.  It seemed a fitting way to honor the season and the darkest day: by looking at lights.

So that was the vision I had for today.  Here is what actually happened:

The kids slept in until about eight, so we were able to get partially ready while they still slept, and then we kept Alice occupied in her crib with some books until we were fully ready.

Here is a video, starting when Alice gets released to come to the living room:


After opening her first two presents, she did a pretty good job staying focused on unwrapping.

Simon watches the present unwrapping action with great interest.

She got two main toys: a marble run and some wooden blocks.  She also got a flashlight, two Thomas books, and a book called Roly Poly Pangolin that I had to read again and again to her all day long.

Simon happily munching on one of his new toys: some plastic keys.

We took a break for cinnamon rolls.  Alice ate about half of hers, but she didn't like the inner most circle because it was "squishy."  She has no idea that that is the best part.  She doesn't seem to have much of a sweet tooth.

Then the kids actually played with their toys for a bit.

Then we headed off to the art museum park to play and enjoy the beautiful weather. I am always really happy that Alice enjoys playing outside so much.

Alice was getting tired, so we drove home and she napped, then played, then Simon napped...it was a very relaxing afternoon.  Then we went to the restaurant, called Banana Leaf.  We could have walked there, but we needed to have the carseat to put Simon in, so we drove.  It was Simon's first time in a restaurant ever, and probably Alice's first time in about 8 months.  We don't eat out much.  The place was busy, which was nice because it was a little noisy and no one could hear us.  Alice did a great job though (compared to previous attempts at eating out with her).  And Simon, as always, was the epitome of a calm, happy baby.  

Alice did a great job waiting for the food, then eating the food.  But she was absolutely thrilled when the waiter brought out the complimentary dessert: ice cream with marshmallows on top!  Zac was pretty happy too.

Simon's first fortune cookie.

It was getting late, but I wanted to acheive the last part of my family Christmas vision: a night walk to see the Christmas lights.  There are two areas in our neighborhood that have a lot of lights, so to save time, we parked near one and then walked to the other and back.  One of the houses has a Thomas the Tank Engine blow-up thing, which Alice loves.  (Zac drives her by there on the way home from daycare sometimes).

All in all, it was a beautiful, perfect, happy day.  I had prepared myself to be stoic if my vision didn't play out as I wanted, but I was quite pleased when everything did happen.  Hopefully this is the start of many happy family Christmas/Solstice traditions to come.