'Twas The Week Before Christmas...Pt. 2: Christmas Weekend

With Christmas only a few days away, there wasn't much left for myself & the kids to do but wait...

...and visit Winterhaven, the Tucson neighborhood that puts on its own festival of holiday home-decorating every December. I love going to Winterhaven; I enjoy looking at Christmas lights, and it's fun to see the different themes each house puts up. The level of creativity & theatricality is pretty breathtaking sometimes.

This year, Nathan stayed home with Aurora to work on a "special project" (more on that later), and I took Lorelai & Celeste with me. To make sure we got there in time, I took them out to a fine dinner ("fine dinner" for kids = McDonald's) beforehand. Then we went & found parking (usually, all the free parking for Winterhaven is at least a few blocks away from the neighborhood itself), and went sight-seeing. Here's some of the highlights from Winterhaven 2011:

This whole house was redesigned gingerbread-style. Being a brick house, the effect was pretty amazing. I love it!

I'm not a huge fan of the Cars franchise, but I thought this was one of the more clever home designs. There were about a dozen life-sized cutouts all over the property, including Lightning McQueen pulling a sleigh suspended in the trees! Plus, the whole facade of the house was redesigned to look like Flo's Cafe. Neat!

Here was a mideval-styled home, complete with a dragon pulling a handcart full of toys. The wedding proposal at the top of the castle is for real, too! (She said yes. We asked.)

This house was covered head to toe with lights, reminding me of a Christmas movie favorite, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. They also had set up a big screen and were showing Christmas films throughout the night.

There's always at least one "current events"-styled house, and this was it. "Occupy X-Mas!" There was a tiny tent in front festooned with Christmas lights, and lots of misfit toys were lounging around in front. On the other side of the lawn was a teddy-bear "Tea Party." Get it? Get it?

This home is possibly the most impressive...it's all wired together & performs a sound/light show every few minutes. As you can see, it even has a choreographed Bellagio-style back-lit water fountain out front! Really cool.

The "Harry Potter"-themed house is always one of my favorites!

It was a pretty cold night (it went below freezing), so the girls were pretty chilly...but they still had lots of fun!

Now imagine at least two dozen more houses, all decorated something like this, and you can get a sense of how lovely Winterhaven can be. I can't wait to do it all again next Christmas!

After a long drive home in the warm car, we were all pooped...and slept in the next morning (Saturday--Christmas Eve Day!). However, "Santa" came a little early this year to make a special delivery to our backyard:

Behold, Nathan's "special project"! We had hoped to have the trampoline assembled in time for Christmas morning, so Nate started working on it while we were at Winterhaven the night before. However, my husband was just too efficient, and so it was ready to go on Christmas Eve morning! Not that the kids minded, of course...

The trampoline was a great early Christmas present!! We are all loving it so far.

After assembling the trampoline, it was a pretty quiet Christmas Eve; I just cleaned the house and made Rice Krispie Treats for "Santa." I always like the look of the tree once the presents are all underneath it:

And the next morning (well before sunup of course!), it was CHRISTMAS DAY!

You probably all know the drill--kids haul you out of bed; presents randomly torn open; a day of eating junk food, playing with toys, and otherwise being totally useless. We did have to go to church for a little while in the afternoon...it was a short Christmas-themed sacrament meeting, and I played "O Holy Night" for a soloist. Other than that, my time at church was blissfully responsibility-free.

We also got a Wii game console this year, and thus our dreams of entertaining the girls with lots of cartoons, and the parents' dream of streaming Netflix through our television, were simultaneously fulfilled. Here's what our girls looked like for much of the following week:

...that's right; they sat on their comfy new inflatable chair, watching TV and playing the Wii...and I'm proud to say I joined them for much of that time!

But not all of our post-Christmas week was spent in total indolence. Nathan & I were gearing up for our 10th wedding anniversary extravaganza! I'll write more about that next time.

'Twas The Week Before Christmas...Pt. 1: Finding Winter in AZ

School was out! Our Christmas packages were all shipped! Our presents were all wrapped! Now there was nothing left to do but wait...and keep the kids from going crazy. Due to his new job, which only started in July, Nate had to work for most of the Christmas holiday...so we Barrett girls were left mostly to our own devices.

We decided to open Grandma's presents early, in anticipation of our winter trek!

First up: find some snow! Lorelai and Celeste have both been lamenting this whole winter, "I wish we could see snow. I'm sad that it doesn't snow here at Christmas!" Not so fast, kids; although snow in southern AZ is admittedly hard to come by, it's not impossible to find. In fact, Mount Lemmon is only about 90 minutes from our house--it's a 9,157-foot peak just north of Tucson that boasts the southernmost ski resort in the continental United States. And, as luck would have it, there had been lots of rain the weekend before--and "rain" usually translates to "snow" on Mount Lemmon.

I had to check the road conditions online; sometimes the snow overwhelms the not-weatherproofed highway, and the road up Mount Lemmon is closed. Luckily, the road reopened early that Monday morning, so off we went!

 

At the foot of the mountain, a few police officers were warning people away unless they had snow chains on their cars. Bah! Snow chains are for sissies! I thought, and up we went anyway. My girls' miniscule bladders started acting up just a few minutes into the drive, so we had to get out at a campground on the lower mountain to take a "break." As you can see, we were driving through pea-soup fog at that point. But still...no snow.

However, that changed once we hit about 5,000 feet! At first we saw little white piles spotting the side of the road. As we progressed up the mountain, we started seeing snow clinging to the tree branches...then the rocks...then all over the place! Unfortunately, we didn't make it all the way up the mountain...the roads weren't plowed past 8,500 feet or so, and I wasn't going to risk my kids' lives trying to make it all the way to Summerhaven in a thick fog on a narrow, shoulderless road. However, when we stopped, the view was pretty breathtaking:

For someone like me, who grew up in Colorado and is used to snow in the wintertime, this was a gorgeous trip back through time. For Arizona babies like my girls, it was an incredible novelty. It was also (to their surprise), very cold in the snow. Lorelai kept shouting, "Why do my hands feel funny? They don't want to work anymore! What's happening to me?!?!?" Yeah, well, welcome to winter, kid.

Then there was Celeste, who (after overcoming her initial trepidation) was fascinated by the snow, and couldn't stop slurping it off her gloves. Ew.

And then there was poor Aurora, who went from being bemused by the snow, to wary of it, to terrified of it, all within about 10 minutes. I guess she is a true "child of the desert"--maybe she was too young to really appreciate a winter wonderland!

Anyway, by and large, a good time was had by all. We watched some older kids sledding (note to self: find a sled for next time!!), tromped through the trees, and even made a few wimpy snowballs. We didn't stay long (perhaps half an hour or so); after that the kids were all too cold and hungry, and I had to be home in the afternoon for piano lessons. At least that's my excuse; I was a little cold & tired too! Yes, I have become a wimp; I miss the snow very much but I'm just not acclimatized to it anymore. Darn Arizona.

Well, hopefully we'll do this again next Christmas...it was a really cool (pun intended) experience. Next I'll talk about some of the things we did to celebrate Christmas back in town.

Last-Minute Christmas Rush! Pt. 3--Gingerbread Houses & Other Stuff

Let's see if I can get caught up...

First, Lorelai had several big Christmas activities in her first-grade class this year (including going to school in her pajamas and watching The Polar Express), but one of the most exciting activities (and probably the messiest) was the gingerbread-house-making activity. Parents were invited, so I decided to come lend a hand & take some pictures.

Now, since these are first graders, and everyone's on a budget, no actual gingerbread was used in making the gingerbread houses. Hee hee. However, there were tons of graham crackers available, and many many buckets of frosting. In addition, Lorelai's teacher provided a small milk carton for each kid, so they could "frame" their house properly--I thought it was a great idea and it helped the houses from falling apart!

Here are all the "trimmings" for the houses...

And here are the mountains of graham crackers, candy & icing, with Celeste & Aurora jealously looking on...they came along as my "helpers"/hangers-on.

Lorelai was hard at work applying various decorations.

Lorelai's finished house...cute!

Here are several more homes, waiting to harden for the trip home after school!

It probably goes without saying that Lorelai's house didn't last the weekend. By the end, she was literally licking the icing off the milk carton. Eeeewwww...

That very same night, our ward had its annual Christmas party. The theme was The Polar Express (again; Lorelai got two "Polar Express" parties in two days!); once again, our kids were in pajamas! It was a nice enough program, though...the Primary sang a song, there were a few special musical numbers (one featuring a harp!), a Nativity reading, the Bishopric singing The Chipmunks' "Christmas Song"--you know, the usual ward Christmas party fare.

Nativity reading/harp solo

Unfortunately, most of my pictures from the party didn't work too well, but hopefully this gives you an idea what it looked like. Plus, in this picture you can see the cute handcrafted mini-Christmas-tree centerpieces that were at each table; a friend of mine helped make them, and then gave one to me after the party to keep! Yay! I love accumulating new Christmas decorations that I don't have to make myself :)

Plus, every kid got a little jingle bell to take home. Lorelai had lots of fun waving it in our faces for a few days. However, I have a bit of an affinity for the sound of jingle bells myself...I find them soothing and evocative. So, I have one of those jingle bells in my purse to this day (January 18, 2012!), so I can listen to the festive sound it makes when I'm walking around :)

And thus went the last day of school before our long Christmas break (Lorelai's charter school takes three weeks off at the end of the year!). On the following day, it was yet another Christmas party...this time a party for neighborhood residents at the clubhouse. There were many activities available for the family...

...like train riding...

...visiting the fire truck...

climbing around on various inflatable recreation devices...

...and riding dinosaurs at the playground.

Doesn't Christmastime in Arizona look nice and sunny?? It should, because it was...

The "big event" of this day, however, was SANTA. He was waiting to greet all the children, just next to the lake. After a (blessedly) brief wait in line, the girls got to meet the big guy himself.

Some of my daughters were more thrilled about this meeting than others. At any rate, Lorelai was sure to tell Santa the three things she wanted for Christmas: a Wii, an Ariel toy, and a unicorn toy. Well, two out of three ain't bad...more on that in a later blog post...

At Long Last...Our 2011 Family Christmas Message

Well...Happy 2012, everybody...a couple of weeks late!! On Christmas Day, we got the present nobody wanted--a virus-infested computer that crashed and wouldn't operate. Bummer! So we took it into the shop, and two looooong weeks later, it has finally returned to us. Of course, this meant that I have been unable to keep you all updated our our holiday--a fact I'm sure you're all just sick about.


In any case...here, without further ado, is our family Christmas message for 2011. Hopefully in the days & weeks to come, I'll get caught up on blogging.

Barrett Family Christmas Letter--2011

A great big Merry Christmas to all! We've had a big year, with many exciting changes. Our family is happy and healthy as we approach the holidays. We hope the same is true for you and your families.

2011 has been a year of “new” for our family. In February, we closed on our first “new” house! It's only two miles from where we had been living in Sahuarita (we're still in the same ward), so it was the most low-stress move we've ever done. We bought the home from Nathan's parents, so we had access to it for weeks before the actual closing date. So over the course of a month, we steadily moved stuff in. By the time moving day came, we only had a few big items remaining, and some wonderful friends showed up to help us move them.

Nathan started a “new” job in July. He is now a Senior Transportation Planner for the Pima Association of Governments (PAG). PAG is the forum through which all the cities and towns in the region coordinate their efforts on issues that cannot be contained by city limits (transportation, for example). Nathan prepares studies and reports which are presented to the Regional Council, which consists of the mayors of every city and town in Pima County. Nathan also stays busy serving on the Sahuarita Planning and Zoning Commission, teaching the adult Sunday school class, and playing with his little girls.

Adrianne got a “new” job as well this year—she was called as the Primary president for the Sahuarita First Ward, after the ward was split into two wards in July. Luckily, she has been blessed with wonderful presidency members and wonderful Primary teachers who help her out a lot. Adrianne's other “new” job involves part-time preschool teacher—she is part of a cooperative preschool for Celeste. She has also expanded her piano teaching (she now has seven students!), with two recitals a year. Whew! She also keeps busy taking care of the kids and cooking yummy food (when she has the time).

Lorelai has had many “new” experiences this year—she played on her first soccer team in the spring, got a “new” bike (without training wheels!) for her sixth birthday, and became a “new” first grader in the fall! She is our family clown; she always goes above and beyond to make Mom & Dad laugh. She is also an excellent reader and LOVES school (to the delight of her parents). She is a sweet, energetic, sensitive girl who tries her best to be polite & do the right thing. She is a joy to have around!

Celeste is the “new” preschooler in the family! She is doing a cooperative preschool with several other kids, and she is starting to learn her letters, seasons, colors, numbers...the whole nine yards! And, of course, she's learning her music & songs...Celeste has a wonderful memory and loves to sing all day long. She is our “girliest” girl, and she loves her dance class, her many dresses, and anything that's even remotely “princess-y”!

Since Aurora is still so little, most events are “new” to her! She learned to walk just as we moved into our house, and everything has followed rapidly thereafter! Aurora is our most cuddly child; she is happiest laying on stomachs, snuggling in laps, and planting lots of kisses on everyone who will hold still long enough! She is also quite the wandering soul; she loves to go far afield exploring, and she loves to run (usually away from an exasperated parent). She is just starting to speak, and her vocabulary is delightful; we enjoy hearing each “new” word!

We hope that 2012 brings many “new” and wonderful experiences for our family and for yours!