How We Spent Our First Weeks of 2014

Our charter school gives its students a three-week Christmas break. I love it! It's a wonderful excuse to lounge around the house being useless and having fun with family. There is one drawback to this extra-long break, though: if Christmas falls early on in the break (as it did this year), there can be a whole lotta dead space on the other side of the break to fill. Those Christmas toys do start to look a bit boring after a while!

Luckily, we managed to venture out of our house a few times and have fun in the latter half of our break. Our friends the Powells (their son Hyrum is one of Lorelai's best friends) invited us over for New Year's Eve. Last year, we had the Powells come over to our house for fun, games and fireworks, and it was great fun. They decided to return the favor this year...they'd recently moved into a bigger house that could contain all our revelry! This was to be our first visit there.

The bad news? Their house is now one town over from us (they now live in Vail, AZ), and they're not within our LDS church stake boundaries anymore. Their kids will all also be transferred to another school soon. Boo! While we are happy they have a more comfortable place to live (they have six children, and their previous house was only half the size of ours!), we are a little sad it is so much further away. Hopefully we can make an effort to stay in close contact with them over time.

We had a great New Year's Eve with the Powells. We played one of Nathan's new Christmas board games (Castle Panic, a cooperative game in which everyone defends the castle from approaching monsters!). We also played the party classic Apples To Apples Jr. (this was Lorelai's Christmas present) and another party game called Quelf, which involves every player to do demeaning and embarrassing things in the name of winning. As you can imagine, the kids loved that game and the adults (being sober) were bemusedly tolerant of it.

We also had a nice dinner (ribs, mmm!), and we set off some fireworks as well in their big backyard. All the kids watched from the porch or trampoline, and there was much rejoicing (yaaay...). 

When midnight finally rolled around, only Lorelai remained awake out of our girls (Celeste made it to 10:30 though...she'll get there one of these years!). We told her that at midnight on New Year's Eve, you were supposed to give someone a kiss. She ended up chasing Hyrum all over the house, but I'm not sure she ever got a kiss from him! Hyrum was very determined to avoid it. Ah, the joy of the "cooties" phase. Not long after, we loaded up our sleepy kiddos into the car and headed home, prepared to sleep away New Year's Day.

We still had our annual New Year's Day breakfast (monkey bread, sausage, fruit salad, & juice), but I am happy (embarrassed?) to say that is about all we did for that day! I had hoped to take the girls up to Mt. Lemmon to go sledding sometime during the holidays, but southern Arizona has had a lovely warm winter this year, so there was no snow to be had. Oh well...more time to sit at home in our pajamas, I guess.

On January 2nd, the Christmas break officially ended for Nathan...he had to go back to work! At least he got this awesome late Christmas present from one of his coworkers:

This beautiful hat is not only great for keeping your head warm in the wintertime, it's a reference to one of our favorite shows, Firefly. In one episode, resident tough-guy/mercenary Jayne Cobb gets a goofy knitted hat in a package from his mother. It fits poorly, is crazy-colored, and seems a poor fit for Jayne's persona. Jayne himself loved the hat, and could be seen wearing it in a few episodes thereafter. As another character commented, "A man walks down the street in that hat, you know he's not afraid of anything."

That Friday, we decided to pick Daddy up from work just a little early and go out to eat as a family. First, we had our main dinner at El Pollo Loco, a small chain that specializes in fire-grilled chicken. It's actually quite tasty, but there aren't a lot of them in town, so we don't always make it up to the north side to eat there. On this night, though, we made an exception for two reasons. First, there was a Bookmans right next door to the restaurant; a chance for the kids to use up their Christmas gift cards buying some new books. And second...

...we had a family dinner date at The Melting Pot, which was just a short drive away! The Melting Pot is a fondue restaurant, and it can be quite pricey. However, my darling brother Ray and his family sent us a Melting Pot gift card for Christmas, and we thought it would be fun for all of us to try out their chocolate dessert fondue.

The girls were pretty impressed by the burners on the tabletop, and even more so when their fondue started melting all together (they'd chosen the S'mores-flavored fondue, so the chocolate base had marshmallow cream & graham-cracker crumbs added). When it was time to dip the fruits, brownies and treats, they were in heaven!

 

I suppose that after a fun family date night like that, there was nowhere for our winter break to go but down. And it's true we didn't do much of note for the last week of our vacation. All my piano students returned, Nathan was back at work, and Celeste & Aurora both had dance classes again, so in many ways, that week felt more "back to normal" than the first two weeks. We also did get a chance to go to the zoo together on a lovely sunny day:

On one other day, we were lucky enough to go to Grandma Barrett's house and pick fresh grapefruit from her tree in the backyard.

 

We have spent many happy mornings devouring these fruits!

Other than a little more shopping, though, not much else of note happened to us. However, I have a feeling that when life is getting nuts in April or May, I will look back fondly on those slow January days and realize that such days are to be treasured. I'm thankful for the busy times in my life, but I'm also grateful for the down times, too. A little boredom is good for the soul now and again.