Saturday, December 27, 2008

Happy Holidays To You

Once again I have been a neglectful blogger. We've been so busy over the last few weeks, hopefully next week will give us a chance to decompress.

In the past few weeks we...

Visited Santa

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Made gingerbread houses at cousin Danielle's

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Went to Patrick's preschool holiday sing (in the rain, ugh!)

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Celebrated Christmas Eve at Grandma Mildred's

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Set out cookies for Santa (and carrots for the reindeer)

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Opened presents Christmas morning

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Spent the afternoon with cousins and grandparents

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And had dinner with Nana and Papa, where Uncle Nick gave Patrick this awesome Batman Big Wheels

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And my Buche de Noel turned out fantastically

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So there you have it. The last 2 weeks in pictures. Hopefully we'll have some adventures to report on next week :)

Friday, December 12, 2008

Big Science

A few months ago the newly rebuilt California Academy of Sciences opened up in Golden Gate Park. I've been dying to take the kids but I also have a low tolerance for all the crowds a new museum brings. So finally this week I took the kids along with Nana and Papa. I loved the Academy of Sciences and Steinhart Aquarium when I was a kid, so it was fun to see that they kept so many of the original displays. We were all pleased to see our favorites return (mine was African Hall, Nana's was the alligators, and Papa's was the pendulum). If you haven't been, it's a must see. We plan on returning as much as we can in the next year (with our newly purchased family membership).

Patrick finally got to see a complete dinosaur fossil (skeleton?). He's been asking to see one. Here he is in front of the T-Rex, which it turns out has freakishly tiny hands.

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Nana and Molly at the touch pool in the aquarium. Molly really, really liked it and probably would have happily climbed right in with the starfish. BYO Purell.

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The alligator exhibit had some silly mist being pumped in so they were hard to see. This is the albino alligator. And they kept the art deco seahorse railing from the original building. Very cool!

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More Academy pics on Flickr! Plus pics of our Christmas tree, check it out!

And in house news, out bathroom remodel is 95% done. Whoo hoo! We're still missing the quarter round trim tiles for the shower. Never mind that they were ordered the first week in October and we were told they would be in in a week. Don't order tile from Walker-Zanger unless you have nothing but time. The tile won't be here until mid January, so Jo will finish once that comes in. He's still got a few tiny things to do like adding cabinet hardware but we're mostly done. I need to figure out where to put the towel rack, and ideas? Common sense would be putting it under the window right outside the shower, but I hate the thought of covering up that pretty glass tile. I was thinking of maybe putting a train rack style bar over le toilette, like you often see in hotels. What to do?

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Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Broke Down

My laptop inexplicably died over the weekend. It had tens of thousands of pictures on it (someday I will get around to printing some of them) that had mostly been backed up. Tom was able to save me, but it involved completely recovering it, back to the original factory settings. Fortunately he was able to get all the pictures off before he did it (safe mode? I have no idea what that is). So I am back in business with pictures to share.

We had a nice Thanksgiving, Tom took a few days off so we had grand plans for something fun. Instead we shuffled around the house and mostly stayed in. We did get the Christmas boxes down from the attic and went to the Festival of Lights parade. And we'll will get a tree this weekend. Patrick is very excited. I am very nervous. I have a nice collection of Christopher Radko ornaments that I love. I had vivid visions of my lovely but fearless Molly crashing right into the tree and glass flying everywhere. I picture things like this often. Tom tells me it is not normal. I'm not so convinced.

A few pics from Thanksgiving and the parade...

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And just for fun, a few outtakes of our Christmas card pictures.

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(She's trying to bite him here!)

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