One year closes ...

One year closes and another year begins. Before starting the next year, I wanted to post a little bit more about our Christmas Break. We had a wonderful time with multiple guests before making our way to Houston to start the New Year. My parents and my brother G left on Monday morning (28th) while my sister L was able to stay another day. My dear wife's sisters came with our nieces and nephew to help keep the house full of joy (and noise) for the next few days until everyone made their way to Houston yesterday (Wednesday-30th). We will go back to San Antonio tomorrow (New Year's Day) because DS#1 has a soccer game on Saturday morning (Jan. 2nd).

Monday afternoon/evening we played Apples to Apples, a game that DS#2 received for Christmas. We all had a great time playing, but I had to "bail out" near the end in order to start grilling steaks. My dear wife took over and suddenly we won. Hmmm.

DS#3 got plenty of playtime with his aunts, and really, everyone else too. He really loves the new Duplo Thomas the Tank Engine sets that he received for Christmas and is literally able to play with them quietly for over an hour. How often do you see a 2-year old with that sort of attention span?

Tuesday closed with several slow-motion sword battles, as well as some "real speed" play involving foam swords, silly boys, and goofy girls. Of course, the girls came complete with manicured nails. Everyone knows you need a manicure before a sword battle!

DS#3 loved the whole thing. DS#1 isn't in these pictures but rest assured, he took part in some of the crazy fun too.

We are now at CB's house for New Year's Eve with some family game night plans and probably some soggy neighborhood fireworks. I will try to get more pictures and videos up in the future as the kids have been doing some very hilarious things. DS#2 and his cousin N have created a stop-motion Lego video they titled "The Turning of R2D2" which just has to be shown. DD's Christmas gift to my wife and I is a book she created at school titled "The Three Bears and the Stormtrooper"-yes, she does have brothers ... no, we haven't received a call from the school, yet.

Right now though, I just want to say Happy New Year to everyone and wish you all the best.

The Revolving Door

Okay, silly title, but most of my post titles are a bit silly. My parents and my brother G are heading out of town tomorrow morning. My sister L will be staying another day, and DD is THRILLED! I am not sure L's ears won't fall off before then, but I think she enjoys a chance to be with the kids. Sometime around lunch my sisters-in-law M and C will arrive with my nieces and nephew so we get to keep the house full of guests for a while longer. I have to catch up with some of the Christmas pictures in the blog, and probably Facebook. Tonight I just want to make a quick post with a few pictures.

Here is one of my dear sister at dinner tonight with DD and DS#3.

This is one of the pictures taken of my parents with all 4 kids. Tomorrow afternoon I should have time to work on posting more of the Christmas pictures. We are sorry to see them go so soon and we are looking forward to seeing them again in Colorado for Spring Break.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! We are fortunate enough to have my parents here as well as my brother G. My sister L arrived from Boston this afternoon, in time for turkey dinner. The kids always love seeing their Aunts and Uncles, particularly those they don't see very often. G lives in Alaska so we are lucky to see him every 1-1 1/2 years, and most of the time it is a little longer. I am thrilled that they could make it here this year.

Yesterday my lovely wife was on-call so she was at the hospital for a 24 hour shift. The kids and I visited her for a Christmas Eve meal of, well, pizza, but at least we got to have a little family time. Last night, of course, Santa had to arrive, so before I went to bed I had to "take care of a few things." One of the things I did was get out the tripod and the camera and try to take a few pictures of the Christmas tree using only the light from the tree. I was just trying to see whether or not I could get a good shot of the tree with the pictures under it. This one seems to have come out okay (after my dear wife did some work with it).

The kids were very excited about Christmas this year. Apparently DD and DS#3 were up and waking their grandparents at 4:00 AM. I know that DS#3 was up before 5 because he came to my room and I had him changed and back in bed with me to try to get him back to sleep at 5:00. He did go back to sleep and was able to sleep until a little after 7:00 AM. My dear wife got back home by about 7:30 and then the kids were all ready to tear into their presents.

Everyone had a great time, but DS#3 certainly had enough excitement today to end up taking a rare nap. Here he is after he climbed up on his Grandpa to be rocked for a while. Grandpa "ate it up."

Tomorrow should be a fun, though busy day, including a trip to the Riverwalk.

Christmas Cleaning

I have let the kids "get away with" a lot in the "Game Room" because trying to get them to make it really neat and clean is, well, stressful-it involves a great deal of yelling and in the end I do 90% of the work anyway. This week I decided that these darned kids are so spoiled that they have to get to work if they want to make room for this year's Christmas presents-I mean, the coal has to go SOMEWHERE!

Yes, that IS a drink in my hand!

The truth is, I want this room a bit more organized and I plan to send the dining room furniture to be restored in January so I might need the table that the kids use as a storage zone. In addition, we want to do some painting and make some changes in the Game Room so we definitely need to do some clearing out. The problem is that our children are far enough apart in age that the "old" toys (can you say "Thomas the Tank Engine" ?) are played with by the younger children. However, this does not stop grandparents, aunts, and uncles from giving the kids more gifts every year so the collection just grows and grows.

I literally give away garbage bags full of toys to charities every year. This does not include the broken toys we have to throw away. Come to think of it, it doesn't mention the "favorite" toys that I find ways to fix several times before they are unused for a year or so on their way to the next child.

The driving force for some of the cleaning is the fact that my parents, brother, and one of my sisters, will be here for Christmas. Then, we'll have some of my in-laws and my nieces and nephews over for a few days next week. They have all seen our house "as is" and know the chaos of our lives, but their visit, and "don't you want to have space for new toys?", becomes a rallying cry for cleaning up and discarding unused and/or unwanted toys (I hear there is an island for them somewhere ...). Honestly, I don't expect to be as "done" as I would like tomorrow, but that is when guests start arriving so whatever we can get done, well, that is what is done.

Christmas at Fiesta Texas

Okay, I am trying to do better about keeping up with the blog so we get posts two whole days in a row! This morning DS#1, #2, and DD all got hair cuts, and DD had a piano lesson. The afternoon was devoted more to doing a bit of cleaning up before leaving a little before 3:00 to take DS#1 to meet some friends to see Avatar. This was followed by a trip to the Riverwalk and some additional fun while the rest of us had a bit of ice cream and headed to Fiesta Texas to see the Christmas lights. Our fun included a brief sled ride down a man-made snow run (hey, it isn't like you can sled in San Antonio much), several rides, and a visit with Santa.


The visit with Santa was nice in that it wasn't a long line, DD actually wanted to go see him, and because SHE did, DS#3 followed along and let Santa plop DS#3 on his lap. Once upon a time DD was so terrified of Santa (and just about any dressed-up character) that she wouldn't go near him. I guess trips to Disney have changed that a bit. We also got a HUGE kick out of the fact that Santa pulled out a phone and showed the kids some pictures of his reindeer.


DS#2 was having nothing to do with Santa, but boy was he in for a surprise. Santa handed DS#3 and DD candy bars and as we were leaving he waved a candy bar to DS#2 and told him to come have one too. As soon as DS#2 touched the candy bar he was grabbed and pulled to Santa right in front of the camera.

Tomorrow morning DS#2 and I are getting up "early" [translated as, earlier than I'd probably like, but much later than a normal weekday] so that we can make a showing of the Avatar movie in IMAX 3d. The afternoon is going to be taken up with more cleaning and a soccer practice for DS#1. Well, that's all for this disjointed post, maybe I'll post a bit earlier in the evening tomorrow and actually make some sense.

Uh-Oh

Okay, I haven't been posting to the blog anywhere near enough. I guess life is just so exciting I don't have time to blog about it. This means that this will be a really long post, but don't worry, I will put up some pictures. I like to claim that it is because my lovely wife uses my desktop for the pictures and her blog, but that isn't a very good excuse. Don't let her know I said that though (bah, she'll probably read this post), I am trying to convince myself I need a new computer. I have, well, absolutely no (good) excuse to get a new machine, but I am sure I can find one sooner or later.

Let's see, the Fall Season of club soccer is now over which means the kids have a break, oh, wait, no, it means that DS#2 and DD have a break (and so do my lovely wife and I). DS#1 has the high school soccer season to go through, he actually has 4 practices spread over the 2 week break and his first game is on January 2nd. Yes folks, in Texas we play soccer while some of you huddle inside and stare at large mounds of snow.

In any case, DD and DS#2 both played in a tournament the weekend of December 12th (last weekend for those of you counting) and played well. DS#2 made the semi-finals for his bracket which means that between the two kids we had 7 games last weekend. My dear wife has posted some pictures of the games in her blog here.

One would think that the end of the soccer season would mean that we can now enjoy lots of free time, particularly with the beginning of the Christmas Break. Well, that just means we can plan lots of other things to do! Last night my dear wife and I had a wonderful date night that included dinner at Brasserie Pavil-a relatively new restaurant that we hadn't been to before- and we went to the Lion King which was performed at the Majestic Theatre in downtown San Antonio. We had a wonderful time, even though traffic downtown was so terrible that instead of being 20 minutes early, we were just late enough to miss the first 10 minute opening part of ACT I.

Today we had another slow day. First, DS#2 had a guitar recital. Honestly, he was very nervous about it, and really, REALLY did not want to perform in front of an audience. He looked a bit "serious" but I thought he got up there and did a fantastic job. He played with his teacher (with him in this picture), which I think helped with his nervousness. I am very proud of him for stepping up and performing for the recital, I know it was very, very difficult for him and I hope that the experience will help him in the future.

We saw one more performance after his, but then we had to practically run out of the recital to make our way to Laurie Auditorium at Trinity University where we had tickets for the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra and a family oriented Christmas performance. The nicest thing about this was the opportunity for the children to play with instruments beforehand. I was also impressed with how the performance was clearly geared toward children and getting them excited about music. *I* found it more enjoyable than some of the very formal (some would say "stodgy") symphony performances I have seen before.

When I went out with DS#2 and DD through the halls outside, we got to stop and play the Viola. By "we" I mean DD. I was surprised to see how serious she was with it, and how carefully she listened when being told what to do. I had to remind her that other children were waiting their turn, I think she'd have been happy to stay and continue playing with it.

Fortunately, the Symphony was in the afternoon giving us time to get home to eat dinner before, um, going out again ... We went to Santa's Railroad Wonderland again this year and it was a MAJOR hit with DS#3. The rest of the kids had a lot of fun too. In fact, DS#1 and DS#2 had the option of staying home and they chose to come with us, and I know they had a blast.

DD got to talk with Santa for a bit, doing little more than telling him her name and saying she likes legos. Okay, let's face it, she DOES have big brothers. I mean if it weren't for the soccer and the games, and the legos, and the desire for a "light saber" and the, okay, yeah, it is pretty easy to tell she has big brothers. It is also easy to see that she had a great time.

Okay, let's face it, I had a good time too :).

Friends and Aliens

Yesterday, DS#2's friend A, and DD's friend M (who happens to be A's sister) came over after school directly from the bus. A's Mom picks up DS#2 from "Media Club" on Thursdays when DD has piano lessons and was going to be busy after school on Tuesday so I was more than happy to have them come over.

These children have known each other for years, in fact, DD and M were in the same daycare room together at about 2 months old so one could even say that these two have known each other all their lives ;). Now, yesterday was a cold, rainy, dreary day so it was pretty much "inside time" --this meant that the boys played with legos for a while and then went into video game zombie mode in front of the TV for a bit.

The girls played all over the house, generally being chased by DS#3, who, for a while was doing his "I am yobutt" (I am a Robot) bit and then he decided he was a robot butterfly (I am yobutt bu-er-fly). Yes, I did take some video, when I get that uploaded I'll make a short clip and load it here. The picture at the top is of the girls hiding from DS#3 in the hall closet and this picture is of DS#3 after he slipped to the ground with laughter while running around the house.

DS#1 is going through high school soccer try-outs this week and has been getting home late. Once he got home we started eating and watching the tape of the most recent episode of "V." This ended up with a bit of goofing off and laughter when DS#3 started passing out hugs and kisses on the sofa with DD and DS#1. It is fun to have a show that we can watch together as a family sometimes, the comments and jokes make it so much more fun and enjoyable.