Wrapping Up 2013 in 2014, Pt. 4: Our Annual Phoenix Post-Christmas Overnighter

Another family holiday tradition we have been creating for ourselves is a family overnight trip to Phoenix. Counting our trip in 2013, we have stayed overnight there for three of the last four years. We love it! It is a great way to have a little fun in that relaxed, easygoing time between Christmas and New Year's. It is also a nice way to get a visit to the LDS temple in Mesa, and to celebrate Nathan and my wedding anniversary (which is December 27th). Here's how our overnighter went this time, as told in (mostly) pictures.

We got off to a later start than we'd hoped, since we had to spend the whole morning waiting for our minivan, which was in the shop (leaking coolant...ugh). Thankfully, the problem was solved and it didn't financially kick our butts (plus, having the car in the shop for a day and a half meant more time to hang out together as a family post-Christmas, hanging out and having fun together.

We drove up to the Phoenix area as quickly as we could, and we decided to kick off our stay by taking the girls to Makutu's Island, the indoor climbing/sliding/crawling jungle play place that I'd taken them to over the summer. I decided to sit this one out; since Nathan had never been inside it before, and the car needed gas anyway, I spent the next hour hanging out in the car, reading a book and hoping the kids had fun.

Luckily, they had a great time!

Everyone was hungry after all the climbing around, and as luck would have it there was a Buca di Beppo restaurant just a block over from Makutu's Island. Buca di Beppo is an Italian-food restaurant that serves all its entrees "family-style"; you order one or two large entrees and then share them with everyone at the table. The girls split a serving of spaghetti and meatballs, while Nathan and I ate some stuffed shells. Yummy!

Full and warm again, we headed out into the night...specifically, to see the Christmas lights around the Mesa Arizona LDS temple. They put lights up on the temple grounds every Christmas, and it's always great to see them...as well as the beautiful exhibit in the Visitor's Center for Nativity scenes from all around the world.

 

Beautiful Russian Nativity...yay!

We spent the night at a local hotel just a few minutes from the temple. The next morning, my beautiful friend Yulia (she served in the Moscow Mission with me back in the day!) volunteered to watch the girls so Nathan and I could go to an endowment session at the temple. It was the first time we'd been able to go as a couple in a while...and it was also the first time Nathan had seen the brand-new endowment video! As part of one of the temple ceremonies, participants watch a short video detailing the creation of the earth and the Fall of Adam and Eve. This is the first time the video has been updated in more than 20 years (none of the text has changed, but some of the visuals have changed quite a bit). It was a lovely experience, as always.

After the temple date, Nathan and I picked up the kids from Yulia's apartment (we paid her for her services in fancy chocolate; I hope she enjoyed it! We are very fortunate to have friends in the Phoenix area willing to watch our kids while we visit the temple). After grabbing a quick snack to eat, we went to another "fun" spot: the Arizona Museum of Natural History. I took the girls there once about a year and a half ago, and I figured they were due for another visit. Here are some pictures from the museum:

This is an outdoor area for budding "archaeologists," in which they can "sweep dirt" away to find dinosaur bones...

...or footprints.

Panning for "gold" in the same outdoor area

Lorelai had NO IDEA what this typewriter was. Man, I felt so OLD explaining it to her!

Here's the "movie" part of the museum, where the kids inserted themselves into an Old West feature.

Daddy got into the fun too.

We'd walked around for several hours, and now we were all hungry. On our way out of town, we drove through Gilbert, Arizona, and caught our first glimpse of the new LDS temple that is opening up in just a few months.

We weren't able to go inside the building yet (or even park there; the parking lot was closed off), but in just a few weeks we'll be coming back up for the temple's Open House. We are very excited! It will be great to have two temples to visit in the Phoenix area.

These photos were taken out of a moving car. Not too bad, huh?

After that, we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Rudy's BBQ in Chandler. I am starting to think that we'll come here on every trip to Phoenix...but I wouldn't mind that one bit! Soo delicious, and I don't even like barbecue all that much. After that we headed for home, tired but happy. It is always fun to do a getaway in Phoenix with the family. Maybe this year we will change it up a bit and do a short trip up there in the summertime, as well! It might be fun to see what summer activities are good for the family in Phoenix. Does anyone out there have any ideas?

Wrapping Up 2013 in 2014, Pt. 3: Christmastime Is Here!

After all the shopping, performing, shopping, stressing, baking, shopping, driving, and not-sleeping that the pre-Christmas rush brought, it was nice to have a very mellow Christmas with our sweet little family. I have many friends who miss Christmases with their parents and love to travel to their childhood homes for the holidays. I can definitely see the appeal, but I have really come to love a quiet holiday in my own home, with my husband and children. Besides being less stressful, it is a wonderful way to draw closer to one another at the close of a busy year, and to build our own family traditions.

Like making this gingerbread house, for example (okay, technically, we did this the day after Christmas, but this is the second or third year in a row we've assembled a gingerbread house! Surely this is a tradition taking shape, yes?). No, I am not a baking genius; we buy the kit from the store. Regardless, it was really fun to assemble and decorate.

 

My only regret is that we waited until after Christmas to put it all together; with all the other holiday activities we had going on, it got a bit lost in the shuffle. Next year, I want to try and decorate a family gingerbread house before Christmas; it makes the kitchen look a little more festive.

Now back to our pre-Christmas celebrating: Nathan got off work just before noon on Christmas Eve day, so we decided to visit the Children's Museum Tucson while waiting for his work day to end. It's just a short walk away from Nathan's downtown office, and we thought it would be a fun and uncomplicated "last activity" before settling down for Christmas:

Not many pictures from there, but the girls did get to try their hand at watercolors while at the museum

The kids had a great time, and we had a great time with each other. After that, our Christmas Eve was unspectacular, as it often is...I'm sorry to say we don't have a lot of hard-and-fast traditions for Christmas Eve itself. We'd hoped to deliver some groceries to a family who needed a little help for the holidays...but we found out late in the game that the family had gone out of town for Christmas! Oh well, the good deed would have to wait. We settled for watching Christmas movies, making cookies for Santa, and tidying up the house.

Nathan and I have disagreed in the past about how many presents to put under the tree ahead of time. When I was growing up, my parents only put out presents from extended family members under our tree...until Christmas Eve, when they put out everything else (perhaps they did this to preserve the "Santa illusion," despite their otherwise lukewarm endorsement of the jolly old elf? Or maybe they just didn't get any of the presents wrapped in time...that's a real possibility too!). Nathan's family, on the other hand, would put out all the Christmas presents as soon as their tree was set up (usually on December 7th, his mother's birthday). As new presents were bought, they were immediately wrapped & added to the pile.

I think there must be a happy medium between these two methods, and we are tweaking the formula in our own home a little every year. This year, Nathan put out a large portion of our presents under the tree just after Celeste's birthday (more than half of them), but then I wouldn't let him put out any more until Christmas Eve. He was a little surprised by this notion of "holding back" gifts, but he was mostly a good sport about it.

And of course, the stocking stuffers are all from "Santa" and don't go out until Christmas Eve.

Then all that was left on Christmas Eve was for "Santa" and his "reindeer" to have their treat, and then go to bed and await the early-morning wake-up call.

The girls also each got gift certificates to Bookmans, our favorite secondhand store

As usual, the stockings were the first things to be attacked...

...but the rest of the presents were quick to follow!

 

 

I was very touched at the thoughtfulness of many of the gifts. Lots of the extended family sent the girls merchandise from the latest Disney movie, Frozen...which was great, because my girls are totally obsessed with that movie and love everything about it. I am thankful to have many generous and kind relatives (since the cousins on Nathan's side are almost all boys, I also suspect our in-laws have fun shopping for girls for a change!)

Nathan got some new board games for himself, but one gift he really appreciated was this "extreme dot-to-dot" book, which Lorelai found in a store and declared that "Daddy would like it." She was right; what a thoughtful girl!

Celeste loved all her Frozen toys, and she got a scooter too. Now she can keep up with Lorelai when she's zipping around the neighborhood!

Aurora is a huge fan of the Disney cartoon Jake And The Never Land Pirates, so she got a ton of those toys. Every time she opened a present, she squealed, "It's what I've always wanted!!!!" It was completely adorable every time she said it.

I got my aebleskiver pan...hooray! Now I can make fluffy Dutch pastries for my family whenever I want. Here's what my first batch looked like (I made them a few days later):

Serve them with fruit jam and dust them with powdered sugar. Yum.

They were delicious! I've made two batches since, and I sense I will be making them a lot in the months (years?) to come.

I also decided to reward myself for the weight loss I've had this year; I was in need of new jeans, so I went down a size for the first time in years! I was a little afraid of buying the "stretchy" jeans that are in vogue right now, but I have been very happy with them. They are actually quite comfortable, almost pajama-like. The lovely Grinch shirt was a gift from my daughters.

After lounging around for hours at home eating junk food and enjoying our gifts, we welcomed Grandma & Grandpa Barrett over for our traditional ham dinner. Grandma & Grandpa had some gifts for the girls, as well.

Those eyes...those eyes...

They each got some new pajamas, and also these creepy Furby Boom toys. Furbies are electronic pets that respond to your voice and touch, "learning" more of our language and forming nuanced communication...well, as much nuance as a pre-programmed little machine can have. The biggest advantage to the Furby Boom is that it can interact with an application on our tablet. Via the app, your Furby can have "children," eat, sing, take baths, and more.

As you can imagine, the girls were over the moon with these toys. Personally, I've never even considered buying a Furby; I always figured they were somewhat faddish and out of our price range. Now that they are here, I am happy they are bringing my children so much joy. However, their electronic eyes, their abrupt personality shifts, and their weird chirpy voices both annoy me and creep me out after a while. Oh well...I guess that's why they're not my toys.

Oh, and the grandparents included a lot of batteries in with their present. Bless their hearts!

We managed to fit in a game of "Apples to Apples" and "Quelf" with the grandparents (our new kid board games) before they went home. I'm not sure how much they enjoyed either game, but they were good sports. It was great to have everyone together for a little while. I love going to sleep on Christmas night, knowing how happy everyone in the house is. It's a great blessing to be able to feel this way, and I'm very grateful for this opportunity. I hope my kids realize how blessed and lucky they are. Merry Christmas!

Seeing Santas

We are not much of a "Santa" household. When I was growing up my parents would talk in passing about "Santa," but they never made a very big deal out of it. Their Santa talk trailed off more and more as I got older, and pretty soon I figured out for myself that he wasn't a real person. So maybe that's why I don't emphasize him much to my own kids. In fact, for a while Nathan and I would straight-up tell our girls, "Santa isn't real!" However, that led to some heated arguments ("YES HE IS REAL! WE SAW HIM AT THE MALL!", etc.), so we have backed off somewhat and let them believe what they want about Santa...but we don't usually bring him up ourselves, because we don't want them to feel all betrayed and call us liars when they grow older and learn the truth.

I am an opponent of the "if you don't believe, you don't receive" mentality. To me, Christmas is a celebration of the birth and life of Jesus Christ, and I think "requiring" kids to believe in Santa might obscure that simple fact. It could easily confuse kids as to what their belief "priorities" are. My girls talk SO much about Santa every December, with all the frantic excitement that teenagers show for the latest pop stars. When Lorelai was asked to write an essay in school about Christmas, she said it was "about Santa...and Jesus, too...but also SANTA." I have to repeatedly remind my kids that Christmas is NOT just about Santa & presents, it's about Jesus Christ. When I do this, I am sometimes met with rolled eyes and "Yeah, of course, Mom"s. Is it any wonder that I don't want to talk about Santa in my household any more than I have to?

In spite of all this, let the record state that I am not a "Santa-hater," and I will indulge my girls in their belief so long as they keep a proper perspective on things. And yes, I will also take them to visit "Santa" during the Christmas season, should the opportunity present itself. And this year, my oldest kid visited "Santa" not once, but TWICE.

The first visit came at a town holiday party, held at Sahuarita's Municipal Center. There would be kid's games, booths, activities, and a holiday parade! The parade is what persuaded Lorelai to go with me to the holiday party in the first place...the other girls couldn't be bothered (our usual Saturday laziness had crept in).

I was lazy that morning, too...so much so that by the time we got to the activity, the parade was over! (In fairness, friends told me later it was a very short parade.) Although Lorelai was initially disappointed, when she saw who the party's "special guest" was, she cheered right up.

A week or so later, when the girls were out of school, I decided to brave the pre-Christmas mall crowds and take all the kids to see a mall Santa. The line, as you can imagine, was pretty long, but the kids were so excited they didn't mind the wait. Hopefully this same trick will work when we're standing in long lines at Disneyland later this year.

The mall, of course, wanted me to pay an exorbitant sum to get my kids' pictures taken with Santa. No thanks, I said...and the kids totally agreed with me. They didn't care one bit whether they had a picture with Santa or not; they needed to tell him what they wanted for Christmas!

 

Afterwards, my inner devil's advocate won out for a brief moment. I asked them, "Doesn't it seem weird that Santa was in Tucson, of all places, just two days before Christmas? Why would he do that? Shouldn't he be back getting the final preparations ready in the North Pole? How can we be sure this is, in fact, the real Santa?" Without missing a beat, the girls responded that of course that was the real Santa, and that the elves had all the last-minute preparations well in hand at the North Pole on Santa's behalf.

Ah, the sweet, undying belief of my kids...and many other kids too. Sometimes I wonder if I am a terrible parent for poking holes in their Santa belief. Regardless, the kids don't believe me anyway when I tell them the "truth" about Santa! Hopefully they will believe me later in life, when it counts; ie, when I am teaching them the gospel truths or important life lessons!

Our Christmas Performances, All In One Busy Weekend

In some ways, knowing how to play a musical instrument is both a blessing and a curse...particularly around the Christmas season. It is wonderful to be able to play beautiful music for yourself and those around you, particularly around the holidays, when people listen to more music and the songs are well-known to all. However, in order to perform, you've got to practice and prepare, and that requires time...something that is often in short supply in November and December.

Over the last several years, I have always found myself especially busy with music at the end of the year. Usually, it involves me either performing on my own or accompanying singers for various Christmas programs (many of them church-related). In more recent years, I've also started holding piano recitals every Christmas for all my students; while I'm not performing in those recitals, I'm organizing them, which brings its own special stress.

And now that my oldest daughter has started taking piano lessons herself (and is in music classes at school), she is appearing in musical concerts of her own, which is one more thing to add to our Christmas to-do list. She has been playing the recorder (that simplest and shrillest of all band instruments) in her third-grade music class. For the first time, the music director at our charter school decided to invite these younger kids to participate in the school's Christmas concert. Up until now, this concert had been the exclusive domain of the school's jazz band. But I thought it was a nice idea to give the younger music students some performance experience.

Here is Lorelai's class performing "Jingle Bells," all on recorders. Brace yourself...

We were proud that she did well. She has started practicing the recorder more at home, and she has improved quite a bit. Sadly, we had to leave the concert a bit early (we didn't get to hear the advanced jazz band play; darn!), because we were needed elsewhere--specifically, we were needed in setting up a Christmas tree for our ward Christmas party the following night.

This picture frame was one of the decorations at our ward party

Which brings us to some more performances! The theme of the Christmas party this year was "Christmas Around The World," which made for a nicely eclectic dinner (tamales, sushi, rice pudding, potato salad, etc.) and some non-traditional decorations. The main event of the night was a short concert which featured music and/or dancing from all around the world. Both Lorelai and I participated.

I played a piano arrangement of the "Trepak/Russian Dance" from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. I chose this song because it is: A. very Russian; it's the most "Russian-y" of all the Nutcracker dances; B. Christmas-y (because it's from The Nutcracker); and C. quite short; it only takes about a minute and a half to play. I didn't record my performance (which was a blessing; I'll explain in a moment), but here is a video recording of the same arrangement I played:

Sadly, I didn't do all that well at the concert, for a few reasons. I had forgotten I was going to play the song, and didn't practice it far enough in advance. I was ill with a fever and chills that night, and didn't really want to do anything in front of people, much less play piano. And finally, I ended up playing the song on an electronic keyboard which I had never before practiced on, so I was totally unprepared for the dynamic & keystroke differences. Oh well; at least I went first in the program so I could quickly be forgotten about! In spite of all that, it was still a really cool song to learn and play. Maybe if I get a better head-start next year, I can really turn some heads with a "Trepak" performance at some other venue.

You can tell we're in a church building by the raised basketball hoop at the top of the picture

Lorelai's dance number was a little more successful. The Activity Day girls (all girls in the church between 8-11 years old) learned an easy Eastern European holiday step dance, and performed it at the concert just a few acts after my piano fumblings. They had all of one hour to learn this song, and they wore no costumes, but at least it looked like they were having fun!

I crashed and burned that night after the ward activity was finished; my fever had come on the night before (in the middle of the school concert, natch), and I had one more Christmas concert to go that weekend--the piano recital for my own students!

Luckily, a good night's sleep helped me feel a lot better in time for the recital the next evening. I have been teaching ten piano students all fall, and it has been tiring but very satisfying. I have several older kids (9+ years old) now, and it is very exciting to see how quickly they are all learning their music and improving each week. Teaching Lorelai has also been a great experience; I think she has reached that point where she "gets it," and has a solid grasp of the basics. It has made her enjoy playing piano that much more! Here she is, performing one of her recital songs.

And here are all of my awesome students, basking in glory after the recital was done!

The bishop of my LDS ward kindly lent us the use of his house for the second straight Christmas; I don't think we'd be able to fit everyone in my house! At any rate, it is very generous of him and his lovely wife, and I am so grateful to know so many kind, helpful people that helped the piano recital become a reality.

This is me, sick and exhausted but still happy at how well everything turned out

So, to recap:

Thursday night--school Christmas concert/my fever began/decorate the church building for party;
Friday night--Christmas party, in which Lorelai and I each perform;
Saturday afternoon--piano recital. That night, we also attended a large Christmas party thrown by a friend. Nathan and I went there for a little decompression time after a stressful weekend. And, as luck would have it, the school's jazz band was performing at the party! Thus the circle of musical performance was made complete.

My musical know-how was required one more time this holiday season...it was at our ward's Sunday sacrament meeting, on December 22nd. I am currently our ward's choir director, so I had to lead the choir in two different Christmas songs, and later accompany two flutists performing "What Child Is This?". After that, I was happy to take my fingers off the keys until after the holidays. But what sweet music was made this year, by so many talented people. It's hard work, but it really does make the Christmas season so much more enjoyable.