holiday wrap-up 2011-2012

Man, could we ever use a vacation! As most of my eleven readers are related to me in some way, this probably won't come as news to you - since about mid-May, Neal's been on the hunt for a new job.  He was lucky to get a decent severance package but we're in week eight of eight of that package and if I think more than about 2 to 3 days in advance, I'll admit I get pretty bummed.  I know it could always be worse, but damn, it sure could be a lot better at the moment.

But enough time sitting on that pity potty. What say we relive some memories of holidays and vacation time spent over the past year!   Okay, okay, so Oktoberfest isn't exactly a holiday but for the second year in a row we checked out Oakland's own Oaktoberfest in the Dimond neighborhood, where Elias, who doesn't usually enjoy soda ("too fizzy"), nevertheless found some merit in his first root beer float.  Cheers!

In the same spirit as Oktoberfest-as-holiday, we celebrated my birthday a couple of weeks later with a dinner at Zza's, where Neal and I had our wedding rehearsal dinner over seven years ago.  I'm not a huge fan of gift-giving holidays (preferring food-centric holidays like Thanksgiving instead), but I do enjoy birthdays (more about Eli's latest anniversary at the end of this post).

Halloween wouldn't be complete without a trip to the pumpkin patch. This year we traveled once again to Livermore to the pumpkin patch we went to the year before. It's a little crazy to look at those pictures and see just how much Elias has grown in a year!

As I mentioned in my last post, Elias celebrated Halloween 2011 as the big bad wolf, with Neal and I standing in as the three little pigs, wearing pig ear headbands, pig snouts, and pig tails, with assistance from a pig finger puppet I kept tucked in my jacket pocket as pig #3.

If I remember correctly, Elias came down with his first (of many) nasty colds and viruses right before Halloween weekend, keeping our usually lengthy celebrations to a minimum, which probably wasn't such a bad thing as we tend to overdo it a bit with these multi-day celebrations, completely burning out before the actual holiday!

We did manage to carve a couple of pumpkins. I'm not sure what Elias is doing here - lounging with the jack-o-lanterns it seems.

As I mentioned in my preschool post, there was a costume parade at school, followed by a "boo-fet".

The parade and boo-fet ended with a bang for Elias.  Still recovering from that bug and after eating way too many treats like the graveyard brownies above, he threw up in the classroom, all over the circle time rug. Yep, that's my kid - the barfer.  Needless to say he came home with me for the rest of the day.

But that didn't keep us from trick-or-treating later that evening.  With full disclosure about Eli's earlier "episode" we headed to Hazel's place for a pizza party and trick-or-treating around their neighborhood.  Elias is still fortunately pretty pleased with a relatively small amount of candy.  I wonder when this whole Halloween/trick-or-treating thing will really kick in.  He was more into it this past year than the year before, but he's just not - not yet, at least - one of those kids that is the first one out the gates, so to speak (candy from strangers, eggs at an Easter egg hunt, etc.).

For Thanksgiving this year we traveled back east to celebrate in Connecticut with my brother and his family.  I've wanted to do this ever since we moved back to California three years ago since, during the four years we were there, we celebrated every Thanksgiving with them (coming back to California for all but one Christmas). The trick to flying anywhere for the holidays is to fly on the holiday, which worked out pretty well since my brother was working on Thanksgiving anyway (firefighter is his day job...I could tell you his other job, but then I'd have to kill you). So we flew on Thursday, and celebrated on Friday.  I snuck in a couple of runs with my sister-in-law, who'd just completed the Marine Corps Marathon for the fourth or fifth time (seriously, I've lost count at this point) a few weeks before our visit, while I had just started training for the Oakland Marathon this past spring.  We also spent a girls' afternoon out shopping with my niece.

Other highlights included riding cousin Alejandro's scooter around the 'hood while sporting cousin Adriana's old helmet. This inspired the gift of his own scooter for Christmas.

Hanging out with Jed, the dog.

Visiting local playgrounds.

A decent hike (three miles or so, round trip...he was carried for at least half of that) in Sleeping Giant State Park...

...the highlight of which is this stone observation tower that resembles a small castle where we stopped for a snack.

And finally, a visit to the Children's Museum in West Hartford, followed by lunch at the only decent Mexican food in New England: Chipotle (I would say I'm kidding but it's kind of true).

Up next? Christmas, my favorite (I'm being just a tiny bit facetious). This year we decided to establish some boundaries, reserving Christmas eve and morning for us only and inviting anyone who cared to visit (i.e. Grandma Joanne) to come up late Christmas morning and spend the rest of the day and night. I don't know how Grandma felt about it but it worked out so well for us.

This year we drove out to a live tree farm and actually cut down our tree, a first for me (something Neal did pretty regularly in his childhood).  I think this is where we went but I honestly can't be sure at this point!  The trees were not cheap, and we ended up with one of the cheaper varieties and, not to complain (I am the person who doesn't care too much for Christmas traditions, after all), but I was never really happy with the tree.  It just didn't look like a Christmas tree.  But Elias didn't seem to mind.

Some Bay Area holiday festivities have become tradition, like checking out the houses and lights along Christmas Tree Lane in nearby Alameda. New this year was a trip to the Oakland Zoo's Zoo Lights with buddies Ivan and Zach.  We went while Neal celebrated his brother's birthday with him down in southern California, but I'd love to do it again this year with the entire family.  The trick, I think, will be to get there right when it opens, hit the train first, pack a picnic dinner (or eat an early dinner before or on the way), and give up any hopes of getting Elias to bed on time that night.  Actually, that's not a bad idea for the entire month of December.

Ah, Christmas eve. My favorite part.  Once again, we had pizza for dinner and checked out the lights at the Mormon Temple.

When we got home Elias got to open one gift (pajamas! what a surprise!) and then we set out some treats for Santa and his reindeer.

The highlights as far as gifts included a drum set (what was Santa thinking, right?!) and a scooter, mentioned above.

Despite how things appear in the image above (Elias checked out in a pile of presents), even when Grandma showed up a bit later, the gift-giving did not feel overwhelming, which was a welcome change from the year before.

Neal made a delicious dinner that evening, including coq au vin and pumpkin pie. Yum.

In April we were invited once again to our friends' folks' house in Sacramento for an Easter egg hunt that continues to be impossible to top when Easter actually rolls around the next week!

We decorated eggs for the first time, which went well enough.  I think about a third of our boiled eggs were cracked before they ever made it into the dye.  Elias continues to get frustrated or bored (not sure which) relatively quickly and then wants us to continue the project.

We had our own very brief egg hunt in our back yard...

...and then we finished the day with a traditional Easter dinner of...fondue? I think we may have started a new tradition!

Ah, finally, we get to Eli's birthday a few weeks ago and the end of this epic, holiday 2011-2012 post!  I wrote a fairly lengthy post about the birthday party shenanigans on my other blog if you're interested in even more reading!

In a nutshell, Elias had a great 4th birthday, celebrated over the course of about four days.  One of the things we gave him was a little cooking set, complete with the apron he's wearing above, helping me make special cookies for his preschool celebration.

For his actual birthday, he lucked out with a school field trip in the morning and the rest of the afternoon spent at home, chilling out, watching a movie, and opening gifts.  We headed to Fenton's for the traditional birthday dinner and sundae-bigger-than-your-head.

This year we had his party at the zoo.  We may have spent a bit more than our home party last year but it was so much less work!  I kept the DIY projects to a minimum and while a few details didn't work out as well as I'd hoped, I was pretty happy with the party overall.  Despite some serious stage fright when it came time to sing happy birthday and blow out the candles (to which Eias replied, "no smiling!"), he seemed to have a really good time.

Holy cow, my baby is 4!