December 26, 2012: Celebrating Christmas

Today is our family Christmas day.  My internal calendar is all off this week trying to figure out what day is what.  Today is Wednesday and officially I am back to work today.  Yesterday was the actual holiday that I had off.  That feels weird.  And originally I was driving down to Houston on Tuesday (Christmas) morning but ended up, at the last second, driving down on Monday night.  So even my intended schedule is all off in my head.  My plan is to drive back up to Dallas tomorrow afternoon so that I do not have to drive in the dark at night.  I was pretty tired driving south to Houston on Monday night and would prefer to not have to repeat that.  I wasn’t dangerously tired, just painfully so.  Driving the Spark with no cruise control when tired is extra annoying on a really long trip.

I slept in a bit today but we tried to get Christmas going around nine.  I didn’t get to really participate much this year because I had to work so I set up in the “media room” which can see the living room on our old theater seating that they have in there (I am so used to it being in there that until just now as I am writing this update I forgot that that was our seats that we bought for what we thought would someday be the theater room in the basement but never so much as got a television put down there before we moved out and then went into our living room in Carrollton for a while but didn’t make any sense there.)  So I got to watch the kids open presents to some degree and I popped in and out of the room regularly.  There was not that much going on at work.  Very, very little.  But I needed to stay logged in as there are only a few of us covering this week as so many people are on vacation.

The big gift for the girls is an Apple iPad 2 for them to share.  This is perfect as they currently have just the one original iPad that Liels commandeered from her father. I haven’t been able to use it myself in forever.  I forget that I ever actually had one.  Now they won’t have to fight over who gets to use the iPad and they can have one in use while the other is charging.  They get serious use around our house.  The Grice kids got two iPad 2 tablets to share between pairs as well.

Dominica and I got money to put towards a Roomba floor cleaner for our house.  We are trying to decide if we want the vacuuming model or the sweeping model.  Our lives are a constant challenge of trying to keep the floors clean.  I got a very cool penguin beer stein from the Utica Brewery too.

This was a great Christmas for Liesl.  Being four is like the perfect age for Christmas.  It is magical and exciting.  She had a such a good time with everything from the stories last night that grandpa read to the kids to waking up to all of the presents under the tree this morning to unwrapping presents and the whole experience.  Luciana is still pretty young for it all and isn’t sure quite what is going on, but she had fun.  Liesl was especially happy to get the My Little Ponies that she had been hoping to get.  Her collection is really something at this point.  I think that she got seven new ponies today!

This evening there were a lot of board games played.  Everyone really loves Emily’s new game “Ticket to Ride” which is a strategy board game where you have to build train lines across the country.  Kind of difficult to explain but pretty easy to play.  They played a few games of that and then later on in the evening I joined the group to play a round of Munchkin, which Emily also got for Christmas.  Munchkin is a classic and hilarious adventure card game.

Liesl was upset that she couldn’t play Munchkin but I told her that she could sit on my lap and play and that I would help her.   Then she was very happy and did her best to play the game.  It was very adorable.

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