Whenever I upload pictures, it's this terrible thing where they all get shuffled into completely random order and it drives me crazy. I can either spend time tonight reshuffling them or I can caption them, so captions it is. This may not make much sense in terms of proceeding with a logical order, but hey, Christmas break is such a hodgepodge anyway!!
Here's Juliet one Sunday afternoon when we took a five-mile walk around town (kids on scooters). The weather was so nice!
My best life hack this year was buying pre-cut sugar cookies from GFS and cutting out 2/3 of the headache of sugar cookies. This was a tip from a friend and it totally saved my sanity!
The kids had the Monday-Wednesday off from school while Neil still went to his office, then he had Christmas Eve-New Year's Day off from work, so we basically had ten or so days that were just total "vacation" for us all. Our pre-COVID plan was to spend Christmas break camping in Big Bend & Guadalupe Mountains National Parks in Texas with a day trip into Boquillas, Mexico, but guess what, 2020 is a ruiner of all plans and so as we nervously watched the COVID numbers climb higher and higher we decided to cancel our trip and stay here. We woke up the morning that our original reservation in Big Bend ended to see that the park was completely shut down because of 2 feet of snow (all the roads within the park were closed for a day or two!) and it wasn't until today that the final road was cleared to the campground we'd been planning to stay at, so yikes, think we dodged a winter craziness bullet there.
So we had lots of board games, and lots of daily chores (thanks to Elise for making these!!!)
and about a million workouts (seriously though I had 91 Peloton app workouts in December which is pretty great--and yes we need to remove the drop ceiling in our workout room bc every time Neil comes out of the saddle he hits it with his head).
Every year we do a 1000 piece puzzle, but bc it's 2020 Neil accidentally bought a 2000 piece puzzle, so for four or five nights in a row we stayed up until the wee hours of the morning working on the puzzle while New Girl played in the background (we went through 3 seasons in those 4 days).
Monopoly! Isaac loves this game and the rest of us hate it, but we tried to play everyone's favorites at least once this year.
More cookies (out of order, here we go!)
Here's the beautiful coffee table Neil built for me for Christmas--I love it! We broke it in thoroughly with many many games.
This year's edition of the annual Yule Log. Sooooo delicious...that whipped ganache is the best and I made a mental note to use it all year for everything.
Elise & Paxton gave us Citadels this year and I lost track of how many times it was played! (There were also some VERY vigorous games of Throw Throw Burrito)
A puzzling night
Matty's preschool reindeer hat
Abs putting together a New Year's Day charcuterie board (haha isn't that exactly how we all feel on New Year's Day?).
Monopoly--look how intent Isaac is. I just really do not love that game, haha.
This was one of my very favorite things this year--a giant 3D Hogwarts puzzle. LOVED THIS.
We spent a lot of evenings with everyone at the table working on their different things while we listened to an audiobook (Dealing with Dragons & Searching for Dragons).
Telestrations is a huge favorite for all of us--we played this for a long time on New Year's Eve after we put Matty to bed!
A couple random snowfalls--just enough to make us think we MIGHT have a white Christmas! (Spoiler--we had a dusting.)
Part of the New Year's Eve spread--we had a ton of appetizers (chicken wontons, mini quiches, cocktail shrimp, coconut shrimp, mini egg rolls, spanakopita, grapes, jello salad, and a punch made of Squirt, 7Up, and rainbow sherbet). No 'Lil Smokies bc we forgot to get them early enough and then we still haven't made the jalapeno poppers...ps I gave Neil an air fryer for Christmas and it's basically his new BFF.
Funny little crew!
I think this was Christmas Eve! Neil was almost done so we decided to stain it. It was too cold to do it in the garage so we did it in the kitchen which was
very very stressful. Basically our MO was that one of us would stain a side while the other frantically mopped up spills and then we'd switch for the next side because it was just so nerve-wracking!
Another Monopoly pic...
Meringue mushrooms! Luke is standing next to me saying "Mmmmmmm that looks delicious." Sorry, kid. Next year.
Speaking of Luke, here he is with "Wedgie the Christmas Hamster," who repeats everything you say in a very squeaky voice while bouncing up and down. It's equal parts hilarious and insanely annoying.
More Hogwarts...
I think I took this picture on the last day of school before everyone came home and I'd treated myself to a couple solo hours in the snowy woods.
Hogwarts again, but with Matthew for scale!
Lots and lots of workouts...Matty knows the drill.
Puzzle progress--this was the point where the color variations were so minute that we'd brought in four lamps.
The table set for Christmas Eve dinner.
Et voila, c'est finis!!!
Christmas morning--Juliet woke up at 3:30 and woke up the little boys. I was NOT HAPPY NOT HAPPY AT ALL. I made everyone go back to bed but I was still pretty cranky about it when it was actually time to open presents.
I think this was the very beginning of the break? We had an unseasonably warm night so we went to the Arts & Design district to check out the lights--normally there is a Christkindlmart set up, but due to the pandemic restrictions that was cancelled, so they did all these lights instead (which was also cool because it gave the people who would normally be employed in setting up the Christkindlmart stalls an alternate way to make money).
Ticket to Ride--this was my game choice! And I won, HAH! By one point. :-)
Leaving Santa a little snack--a slice of Yule Log, some gingerbread chocolate cookies, and some carrots for the reindeer!
I never ever get tired of how magical this looks. In our family, we don't put out any presents during December, so when we come downstairs on Christmas morning it's all an amazing surprise.
Anniversary dinner!! Eighteen years, woohoo!! We ordered a TON of Chinese food and had a really fun night all together.
For Nathan's "Matty time" every day (back to those chore charts), they sledded down the stairs every. single. time.
And the INSANELY tall snowman that Neil managed to build from like...an inch and a half of snow. Never underestimate an engineer who's on vacation!
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