Winter Break in Review

Our two weeks of winter vacation are over.

So what did we do? Here are some highlights...

Van Repair

This is never fun, but it's easier to put a car in the shop when you're on break. Our trusty Honda Odyssey had been slightly leaking oil for over a year so we took it in. It could have done with $5600 worth of work, but we picked just the most critical repairs, which wound up costing $2500. Ouch. But at least we can trust our van to run for a while longer, and it sure is nice not to have a car payment.

Cristina's Quilt

Cristina has been working on a quilt for Danya, Sofia's piano teacher. Part of our payment for Sofia's lessons was a quilt, and it's taken Cristina a while to get it done. Like, years. But she's in the home stretch! She spent two long days of our winter break at the quilt shop, pin-basted the whole quilt and started the machine-quilting process. Whatever that means. I hoped for her to have it done by Christmas, but she didn't quite make it.

Night Owls

We stayed up late almost every night, and consequently slept late every morning. I thought I would get up earlier today to start adjusting, but no. I slept till 10. Oh well. I'll plunge back into the work schedule cold turkey. Probably best.

All this sleeping late means the two younger kids watched way more TV than we usually allow. But hey, it's vacation.

We also watched a lot of movies. I saw four movies at the theater (Avatar twice, Frog and the Princess with Bella, and Alvin and the Chipmunks 2/Fantastic Mr. Fox double-feature at the Scottsdale Drive-in). And we watched a bunch of Netflix. Didn't watch any bowl games other than the Gators, but we watched plenty of movies.



Sofia's Phone

Sofia got her first cell phone. It's a pre-paid. We split the cost with her. She's been very responsible with it so far, as we expected. I would never post her number on my blog, because she'd probably get inundated with spam texts, so if you want her number, you'll have to get it from her some other way!

Snow Play in Flagstaff

Already blogged about this, but here's a few more pics:

Check out that icicle!

Videos with Kids

Blogged about this too. But here's another video of some outtakes from our Laundry Fairy video. Probably TMI for most, but family and close friends will enjoy (hi Mom!).




New Year's Eve Party at Amy and David's

We're generally homebodies, but when Amy and David invited us to a small New Year's party at their place, we got out and did the social thing. It was fun. The kids had a blast, and we even took Vivien along. She peed under their Christmas tree. Sorry Amy!

Skating

We rang in the New Year roller skating with Claire's family (the ones we went to Flagstaff with). It wasn't too crowded, which made for a very pleasant afternoon.

Sofia took this picture

Homemade Pizzas

After skating, we made pizzas at home. I made different shapes for each person. Bella and Cristina got butterflies. Sofia got a turtle (which got a little mangled during transfer to oven). Alex's pizza was a Gator head, and mine was in the shape of Florida (we were watching the Gators play in the Sugar Bowl at the time.) Special note: the spinach on the pizza was from our own garden! Awesome!

Alex's Gator pizza

And the Gators won big, with Tebow breaking all kinds of records in his last game as a Gator. A perfect swan song.