A Long Holiday Break

This year as many know was a compressed time period between Thanksgiving and Christmas due to Thanksgiving falling later in the month of November than usual.  It meant cramming a lot more into the few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for us as well.

We got to enjoy a production of the Nutcracker, which starred Lauren's cousin Michaela as one of the children in the opening Christmas party scene.  We also got to babysit for Marie's cousins the following weekend since my sister and her husband were going to attend a Christmas party.  The original plan was for both Lauris and I to go to my sister's, pick up her mother-in-law who was flying in from Arizona and spend the evening with her and the kids.  But Lauris ended up having an emergency trip to Portland to visit his brother who had emergency brain surgery earlier that week, a complication from an earlier surgery this year.

Lauris flew back home on Sunday, as I needed to fly out to Dallas for a work event.  So I drove to SFO with Lauren, and he drove the same car home with Lauren, while I stayed at the airport and waited for my red-eye flight to Dallas.

After I came home from Dallas, Lauren had a Christmas event at Chinese school, where as room parent, I had to prepare presents for the Asian Santa to give out, as well as prepare gifts for the teacher and teaching assistants.  It was followed the next day by my company's holiday party.  We prepared for the event by asking one of Lauren's gymnastics coaches to babysit.  The first time we've ever used a babysitter that wasn't a family member.  My company's holiday party was a lovely elegant affair, held at the Hayes Mansion in San Jose.

We then hosted the traditional Christmas gathering at our house on Christmas Eve, with 20 family members in attendance.  I think Lauris outdid himself this year, with a ham, lobster casserole, cocktail shrimp, king crab legs, as some of the items on the menu for dinner.

After Christmas, I took Lauren to the Winchester Mystery House, as she's been asking to go for a while.  She went when her brother Keith came to visit when she was only 4 years old, but of course she has no recollection of that visit.  I took advantage of a Goldstar discount to the evening Christmas tree tour at the Winchester Mystery house, which is a self-guided tour, with docents along the tour route to answer questions.  Since I had been on a previous tour I was able to explain a lot of it to Lauren as we went along.

I had almost two weeks off for the holiday break, and we chose not to go traveling this break with all the travel we've done in the last year.

During the break we did go out to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, a first for me and Lauren.  We went with Marie and her family, and Lauren seemed to enjoy the amusement park, and we'll be back, since we got season tickets to go for the year.