The kids are out of school this week and the company I work for is shutdown for an end of year expense reduction measure so we all enjoyed the week. Saturday was a hoot as we were getting ready for Sydney's birthday party for family. I had been asked by Sydney to bake my carrot cake and got it all mixed up and ready to put in the oven when I noticed that the oven had sparks inside and a white-hot glowing ember from the heating element shorting out. I hit the breaker and took the cakes to Mom and Dad's house to finish them in the oven and see if we can get their new laptop connected to the Internet. Long story short, two totally disfigured cakes - no clues what went wrong there - and two calls to India and the Philippines and no luck on either task. :( I had to get home to go to mass. Julie's sister Janet was kind enough to bake a new cake for Sydney. We went to mass, picked up the pizza and came home to have her party. It was nice and we got some more good use from our Flip video camera. After back to back to back parties - 3 days, 3 parties at our house, we were whipped.
Sunday was a total sloth day. The rule was that nobody did anything other than watch TV, play games and have fun. We don't get to do that very often and it was nice to be able to literally "do nothing." Monday was spent being less lazy and featured such fun events as laundry, running the vacuum, doing dishes, etc. Don't get me wrong, we lazed around quite a bit too but some productivity was realized. Neither Julie or I had adoration this week so that meant even less reason to do anything.
Tuesday we went out and hit the library for the kids. We then went to Olive Garden for lunch - nobody wanted Indian except Julie and I - go figure - what is wrong with these kids!? We enjoyed lunch there with a bit of excitement as Veronica somehow managed to push her chair over backwards. Thank God she wasn't hurt and she enjoyed her spaghetti and meatball. Max is turning into quite the cleaner as he ate his kid's meal and polished off Sydney and Veronica's. Time to move that buy to the full size meals, we think! We then went to the Polaris mall to see if we could exchange some clothes for the right size. No real surprise, but neither store we went to had what we needed. Julie is on a quest for a Mom's calendar that has a line for each child. We had one last year that had 5 lines, but we're hoping and praying that this year we'll need one with six. We checked at the calendar places in the mall as well as Barnes and Noble to no success. She ended up ordering one on-line so we've covered. After the mall we went to Costco for a quick trip and then headed home, exhausted from a long, hard day! LOL! This being lazy thing is kinda of nice.
Wednesday we had been planning to take the girls to see the new Disney movie while Max and I went to Dave and Busters to play video games. Everything was going according to plan until we dropped the girls off at the theater and headed across the street to the bank. Julie called and said that the movie was sold out to a school group and that Sydney was crying and the next showing wasn't for 3 hours. Max and I picked them up and we went to another theater nearby that was showing the same movie in 50 minutes. We shuffled our plans a bit and ended up reversing the plan where I ran into Best Buy and grabbed the cables we needed to connect the Wii to the component inputs and reconnect the DVD/VCR to the TV. Julie dropped off the guys and then they hit the movie. All's well that ends well and everyone had fun killing things at Dave and Busters and watching princesses kiss frogs. Sounds like the movie is a bit darker than it needs to be and has voodoo and junk like that in it, but the girls didn't seem to notice or more importantly, remember it. We headed home with another successful adventure under our belts.
Thursday was my men's Bible study group and I had to set the alarm to get up even though we moved the normal start time from 6AM to 7AM. This doesn't bode well for next week does it! We had a surprise snowfall last night and the roads were horrible until I got to the freeway. Oh winter how I love thee, huh? After our group was over I came home and Julie left to get her hair cut. The kinds and I enjoyed another lazy day at home and Max and I are getting pretty good at Super Mario Brothers Wii! As it was New Year's Eve we had our traditional picnic in the basement as we rang in the New Year (in London that is - we can't stay up until midnight no matter how lazy we want to be!)
Friday we went to mass and then over to Mom and Dad for Max and I to get haircuts. We visited with them and then headed back to the house to prepare for Sydney's birthday party for her friends from school which will be tomorrow. We all worked together as a team to clean to house, bake cupcakes and get it all done in time to watch the Buckeyes play Oregon in the Rose Bowl. It was a great game and always fun to watch your team win. ;)
We woke up this morning early to start to get back into the groove - that was hard. While the girls were sitting on the couch, Sydney started vomiting. She's now on the couch with a fever of 102 and has vomited a few more times. Needless to say, we've cancelled the birthday party and will have to re-schedule for a new day. Poor Sydney, she is our bell weather for illness and if there is a new and exciting bug around, she's one of the first to get it. This is one of the more concerning aspects for our trip to China, assuming we all get to go. It'll all work out I'm sure but is tough to plan for. Do we do trip insurance and make sure we have a policy that will allow us to cancel some of the travelers? What about H1N1 or some new exciting derivative that might originate in China? Pray, pray and pray some more, huh?
Now that you are caught up, I wanted to make sure we hit some other high points from December.
I finally finished my 3rd and final chapter for the book. They will be submitted to technical edit next week then I'll have to address whatever loose ends there are and we'll be done - I hope!
I had a chance to have lunch with my good friends Mike and Mark that I have not had a chance to see in a long time!
We had a radon removal system installed in the house to get the levels down to a safer number.
The kids enjoyed playing in the first major snowfall of the season and like any good brother, a snowball was in order. ;)
New Year's resolutions - lose weight and learn Chinese - possibly pick up Karate and convince Julie to do some Tae Chi or something (Karate so we can have butt kicking tournaments in the house) ;)
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