Monday, January 4, 2010

Aaaaaand...2010.

The 2009 holiday season is over. Well, almost...we still have a "Christmas party" with Dina's brother and sister (and their spouses and kids) this month, but for the most part we have made it successfully through another Christmas and New Year's!

It was a low-key year, which was great. On Christmas Eve, Dina's mom came over and we exchanged some gifts and set up our Christmas tree. This was the longest we'd waited to set up our tree, but this year there were just too many other things going on to get it done. We also had what is becoming our traditional Christmas Eve sushi dinner. Dina gets better at making it every year. Mmmm....

(A funny side story. On Christmas Eve afternoon, we took Griffin to the dollar store so he could pick out presents for Dina and I and his grandparents. While searching for something for his Grandpa Dean and Grandma Karen, he picked up a big box of matches and told Dina, "Maybe we can give them FIRE!" I'm proud of my little Prometheus.)

On Christmas Day, Dina and I and the kids opened our presents from each other. The kids had a blast, although Rohan and Caden took turns sleeping while the opening was going on. I got a couple of really nice things, but my best present was watching the kids have fun with their new toys.

That evening we went to a nearby hotel in which Dean and Karen had rented a big suite for Dean's kids and their families to get together. We had a good time visiting, and the older kids swam in the hotel's waterpark while our three played in the room's enormous jacuzzi tub. Dean always gives interesting and slightly confusing gifts that are very small-town Minnesota. This year he gave everyone new knit gloves with a roll of quarters inside. I naturally assumed the gloves were to conceal the roll of quarters, which would be held while punching someone, but my wife seems to think that's not the case.

My mom was supposed to come over the next day, but the roads near her hometown of Benson were in pretty bad shape due to ice and snow, so she came over Sunday instead. She wasn't here long, but we had another gift exchange and a good meal with her.

Time passed, and then it was New Year's Eve.

For New Year's Eve we had a couple over who had twins about a year after we did. They also have a 17-year-old. We all hung out at our place for a fondue dinner and for a while afterward, but our guests left before midnight, so Dina and I watched the replay of the ball drop in Times Square. Holy crap did Dick Clark seem old this year.

Much of our spare minutes have been spent over the last couple weeks setting up an entertainment room in our basement. We bought a projector from a friend and mounted it on the ceiling, then moved our surround sound system and Wii, DVD player, etc downstairs. Someday we can replace it with an HD projector, but for now what we have works really well. It's a ton of fun to play very-large-screen Mario Kart! Pretty nice for watching football, too. And if the kids break the screen, we can repair it with drywall and paint. :-) (And even if they break the projector, it was only $150). It's a pretty good risk/reward setup.

1 comment:

  1. The fire story might be the cutest and/or awesome thing I've heard of. LOL.

    ReplyDelete