Christmas Day

Christmas day was really a great day. I found myself (accidentally) having the opportunity to spend a good amount of one-on-one time with each of my kids in the midst of a large (20 people?) family gathering. Of course, I really enjoyed it!!

After we opened presents and enjoyed a HUGE yummy breakfast at my parent's house, we all headed to the beach for a beautiful day. We played our traditional beach football game while Allie took her nap with Grammy Claire:

After the game, half of the crew headed home to fix another HUGE yummy meal (dinner), and the rest of us stayed and enjoyed more beach time. Zachary & I spent an hour making a super cool sandcastle. I stopped for a few minutes while we were building to just enjoy the moment with him. The beach was gorgeous and I was hanging with my little buddy. I was blessed!!

My special time with Allie was just after we all ate and everyone else was still sitting and chatting. She wanted to go & ride her new scooter. So she & I went out on the sidewalk for awhile and I walked beside her while she scooted her cute little self up & down the street. She lead the way and even told me when we should turn around and head back. Again...I was blessed!

Merry Christmas!

Here are a few pictures from Christmas. More to come -

Christmas, round 1

We celebrated Christmas a little early with Mimi & Grandad. We all had a lot of fun. I've decided I like splitting up the Christmas gifts for the kids. When we do all of them in 1 sitting, they are so overwhelmed. Splitting them up allows the kids to enjoy their gifts in smaller chunks, which seems better for them (and the gift-givers).
Since they flew here, Mimi had all their gifts in a box and just "wrapped" them in bags.

Santa

Here's how we do Santa:
Disclaimer: This is our weird way of doing it. We definitely don't feel that it is the only nor the best way for all families. We also definitely 100% support all our friends & family members in their "Santa" fun.

We've told both kids that Santa is pretend, like Mickey Mouse. We do go & see Santa and they can tell Santa what they want for Christmas. However, they know that Mommy & Daddy are actually the ones who get the presents for them.
We've also explained that some kids don't know that Santa is pretend, so we have to keep that a secret. For Zachary, he likes knowing that he gets to be a part of a grown-up secret, so he has done a great job keeping it to himself. Allie thinks Mickey Mouse is real, so the whole "pretending" thing is not a big deal to her just yet.
The reason we decided to take this route with Santa is really about 1 thing. When Zachary directly asked us questions about Santa, we both felt like we were lying to him. Part of the excitement for kids comes from their parents' excitement...and neither of us really go into it. I guess because we just didn't feel very passionately about building it up in Zachary's mind.
We've also had some friends share with us that some of their kids had God & Santa in the same category of their limited understanding and we definitely do not want that.
I will say, one disadvantage that WE definitely have is this "Elf on a Shelf" miracle idea that all our friends are using to keep their children well-behaved throughout December! Wow, what a great idea!
So far, our method for Santa fun has panned out fairly well. The kids get excited to see him each year at Todd's company Christmas party (we actually know the Santa), so they get to enjoy the festive nature of his character. And Todd & I feel a lot more comfortable in our conversations with the kids.
All that to say - here's some pictures from our Santa visit:

Both of them were much more comfortable this year, talking to Santa and sitting with him. It was really cute!

Little Friends

This is Zachary's sweet friend Luke. They were writing their names in the pavement and having a discussion about whether the "a" in Zachary's name should be a capital "A" or a lowercase "a." I loved hearing them disagree with each other but without any hostility. Such cute little ones.

Christmas Musical

The kids had their Christmas musical for school last night. It was super cute. Both of them are recovering from a cold, so their spirits were a little down, but they braved through it and had a good time! We do have video (yay!) and I'll work on getting it loaded this afternoon.

In this picture below, the little girl behind Allie was touching her hair (I think maybe because they both have the same bow?) and Allie DID NOT like this. She turned around and, as kindly as she could, told the girl to stop...a few times. I'm just grateful her assertiveness did not turn into aggressiveness, considering she is on the very front row.

Zachary told me he wanted to "not wear a band aid" on his healing golf-club injury. So, this was the first time he'd gone without a band aid. It really is healing pretty well.

Oh Christmas Tree

The day before we left for New York, we went to a Christmas Tree Farm with my parents and the kids. It was pretty cold and even rained a few minutes, but we had a good time.

Apparently, Allie doesn't appreciate the smell of fresh-cut Frazier Fir trees:

Super fun with Grandpa:

Zachary wore these silly glasses almost the whole time. He's so cute:

Allie, helping:

We got our tree!

Allie was very intrigued by the netting:

Decorating:

Our pretty tree:

New York...random

I'm dedicating this post to all things surprising or randomly interesting in New York.

For example, the city was decorated awesome for Christmas. This picture below is one of the many Christmas-themed giant-sized art displays in the area. They are taller than me. It was super cool. There's another one below (something happened when I loaded these together?)

We found an awesome pizza joint that prepared fresh salads with everything you can imagine to choose from. Then they chopped it all together and spun it with the dressing. It was delish (so was the pizza!).

We also found an awesome fresh fruit & vegetable juice bar, which I loved. I was very surprised at the number of fast-food, fresh-food local places all over the place. We did see 1 McDonalds, but NO other fast food places. I am jealous that New Yorkers have such good wholesome food to eat quickly everywhere they go.

This picture is an interesting wall of real-life greenery growing out of a large rectangular potted box, UP the wall! Aside from Central Park, this was the only natural thing we saw in New York.

We went to Tiffany's, just for fun. This canary diamond is 128 carats and is worth $18,000. Todd told me he'd get it for me next year. Somehow I'm not convinced...

This might have been one of our favorite spots. We asked some locals for a good place to get a burger. They started giving us directions to the place and I interrupted and said, "What's it called?" just to write the name down. Apparently it has no name. And no sign. And no door. It was "behind a curtain to the right after you get in the building...."
We found it, and the line was around the "curtain." It was super busy. You can see the cardboard signs above the register. This was the entire menu. And it was a lot like that soup place on the TV show Seinfeld. The cardboard menu indicated if you don't know what you want, you have to get in the back of the line. The girl at the register wasn't interested in offering any kind of customer service. The food was unbelievably good.

This was an AWESOME beautifully decorated Christmas tree at the American Museum of Natural History. It is decorated out of hand-folded origami animals. I LOVE IT!!

I found the origami Panda for my sweet boy.

NEW YORK!

Todd & I spent 4 days in New York city. For both of us, this was our first time there. We had the best time. SO fun. I'm planning to do 2 NY posts. So this one contains many of the sights we enjoyed.
This is us on a boat headed towards Ellis Island & the Statue of Liberty. Behind us is the skyline of Manhattan.

This is us in line to get standby tickets to Jimmy Fallon's show at NBC. We had success and LOVED being in the audience, watching them produce the show. We even got to shake his hand at the end. If you watch the episode, you can see us during the credits.

This is Todd at the New York stock exchange. Yes! He got to go on the floor. This was a super big deal for him and he got to see some pretty cool stuff behind the scenes. He is telling the Barclays trader to "sell, sell, sell!"

Here she is....the Statue of Liberty with Manhattan in the background. I was enamored by her.

This was our view from the Statue:

This was our view while we were in line. It was 30 degrees, cloudy and windy while we waited in line for almost an hour while the water splashed up and sprayed us. It was so cold but totally worth it to see the Statue of Liberty.

Todd & the bull on Wall Street:

Here's one of a hundred beautifully decorated buildings. This red ribbon is made of Christmas lights and was gorgeous in the dark. Walking through the city and seeing all the Christmas decor was really neat. We maneuvered our way around really well. It is so easy to navigate a city mapped with a grid!!

Here we are, getting ready to go out on the town! This was our first afternoon. The rest of our time there, we were bundled up and unrecognizable...ha!

Here we are in Central Park:

Here are my top ten adjectives for my thoughts on the city of New York:
Fast, loud, busy, dirty, hard-working, intense, interesting, smelly, unnatural, exciting