January is nearly over and I’m just now working on a December post, so my memory of the details is going to be a little spotty. We had barely gotten back from the relaxing beach trip before the month’s activities hit. We took Ian shopping for his birthday present – a new bicycle, wanting to give him time to ride it before he had to leave town for the holidays.
That same day, we also went and acquired our Christmas tree! We used the same configuration as last year – reasonable sized real tree, flanked by a couple of skinny tinsel trees to give us plenty of ornament real estate. This is ironic though because we were so busy for the rest of the month, that we probably didn’t even hang half our ornaments up. I know it sounds silly, but I kind of look forward to seeing the ornaments we’ve gathered over the years, so I was little glum that I didn’t get to hang them.
On December 3rd, Sean’s birthday, Ian wound up having a birthday party to go to. Sean graciously delayed his birthday dinner by a day. We celebrated this year with dinner at Uchiko, which was divine, as always. Ian loves to order the hot rocks beef. They bring out hot stones and little slabs of raw meat. You lay the meat on the stones and let it cook briefly so it has a light sear on either side. I wound up helping with the cooking, but Ian did ALL the eating.
Maya is not a blue jeans kid. She is a leggings-with-wild-patterns kid. The uniform she was required to wear for the beginner band fall concert consisted of her band t-shirt and blue jeans, so we actually had to go purchase blue jeans for her. I took her shopping, and while it took a while, she did finally find a couple pairs she liked. Alas, she hasn’t worn them again since her concert, so maybe she didn’t like them all that much after all.
Ian and his Cub Scout den, as part of their fellowship and duty to god adventure, visited a Universal Unitarian church in town. They are an interesting group in that they don’t have a particular religion; rather they’re open to all, even humanists. I found the notion that even if you don’t have a particular faith you could still have a congregation refreshing. The kids had doughnuts afterward and the kids’ den leader promised doughnuts for good questions asked. While they may not have always asked the most relevant questions, at least they were semi-engaged and paying attention. At the end, they helped clean up a fellowship hall as their act of service.
Maya’s band concert was on Wednesday. I had picked her up mid-morning to go to a doctor’s appointment. She presented with a headache, for which she refused to see the nurse for a Tylenol. It was clearly one of her very bad, feeling nauseated, needed to lie down type headaches, and I told her she didn’t have to go back to school after her appointment. She was adamant that she would not, WOULD NOT miss her concert. She relaxed after I promised that even if she went home and rested, we would take her to her concert that evening, headache or not. I don’t think her headache was entirely gone, but she performed admirably nonetheless. It’s amazing to me how far they’ve all come in just a few short months.
Ian has been very into horror themed things lately. His art is often kind of gory or spooky. He wanted to be a zombie pirate at Halloween. He sought out a bloodied up Six Flags person to have his photo taken with on a recent Fright Night trip. So when he asked for a horror-themed birthday cake, I warned him that my artistic skills probably weren’t up to snuff. We did find a cake only that we could kind of model though that looked like it had kind of a rip in it with spooky eyeballs peering out, and blood dripping down the sides. This is what we went with.
We had a roller skating party with a handful of his friends, and I couldn’t help but wonder if his cake would turn off some of the other kids and parents. Alas, no. Everyone seemed into it, and the caked turned out very nicely. We wound up letting Ian open gifts the same night he had his party – the 14th – so that there would be a little more separation between his birthday and our Texas Christmas.
The next day, we did service projects for a couple hours at Ian’s elementary school as part of his Cub Scout activities. Some kids raked leaves and tidied the grounds. Our den built soccer goals. While Ian and I were doing that, Sean and Maya went to watch her band directors perform at a concert up at Cedar Park High School as kind of a send off for some kind of competition they were entering. Maya went partly because she was offered extra credit and partly because she just enjoys things like that. I hear it was a good show, and I’m betting it was more fun than building a soccer goal.
Ian’s birthday dinner was a couple nights later at Estancia, a Brazilian steakhouse (a churrascaria). Given Ian’s meat-eating tendencies, we figured he’d love it, and Sean and I hadn’t been to a place like that in years. The servers / gauchos wander the dining room with the most beautiful pieces of meat on skewers. Each participating diner is given a card that’s green on one side and red on the other. If your card is green, they’ll keep coming by and offering you meat till you turn your card to red. My favorite (and I think Sean’s too) is the picanha cut. Ian liked all kinds of red meat. Maya enjoyed shrimp and sausage and the extremely well-stocked salad bar.
We tried to do all the Christmas things on a very shortened cycle. We decorated a small batch of cookies. We reprised the pour-painted “planet” ornaments from our NASA trip last year to much greater success (though their paint wasn’t dry yet by travel day, so we didn’t manage to give out our grandparent gifts this year). Hopefully we’ll remember to bring them by over the summer!
We celebrated our Texas Christmas on the 18th (Ian’s actual birthday) with a pan full of Sean’s shrimp scampi. We opened gifts and tried to spend a little time enjoying them before we had to head out of town.
We flew from Austin to Memphis on Saturday morning, the 21st. We were at the airport probably 2-2.5 hours early because we figured it would be bonkers. And bonkers it was. We waited in a massive line just to check our bags. Then we waited in another line to actually turn in the bags we had checked, And then we waited in yet another giant line to get through security. They were moving us along pretty well though, so we made it to our gate with juuuuust enough time for a couple of breakfast tacos to be purchased.
It’s always a bit of a hassle getting our rental car at Memphis, and this time was no different. They didn’t have the full size car we rented but offered a midsize instead. We thought about taking it but after some examination, didn’t think we’d be able to fit our giant luggage and transfer gifts, so we held out. Eventually they cleaned a full size car well enough that we could hit the road.
We made it to Alabama that evening without too much trouble. Unfortunately this year we wouldn’t overlap with the Jester clan’s visit, so things were a little more subdued than normal. Still, we packed in lots of fun. We went to a cabaret show one evening (think Christmas carols; nothing too risqué), which I think all of us ultimately enjoyed. Over the course of our visit, we ate at Okinawa, watched Moana 2, and played with the cats at length. Maya practiced her oboe, and Ian learned some introductory crocheting.
We drove to Missouri on Christmas Day after a lingering lunch with Lolli and Pop. The weather was good, and owing to the fact that it was Christmas Day, there wasn’t a lot of traffic, so we made good, easy time. The only tricky thing was finding food for dinner. We did eventually find something and arrived in Missouri without incident. Plus our rental car got astonishingly good gas mileage, so we didn’t even have to refuel.
Our Missouri visit was good. The kids got to eat Imo’s and Hoeckeles and The Bayou. They got to go to Circle U and spend a gob of quarters on games. They met a friendly neighbor kitty and spent time with their cousins and aunts and uncles and of course their grandparents. We played Left, Right, and Center, Ian helped Grammy cook breakfast and learned to drive the side by side, and Maya serenaded the entire family with some very loud oboe music.
Our trip home was … lengthy. As we were driving to Memphis (by way of a UPS at Cape Girardeau to ship our gifts home), we kept noticing the drive time increasing. Memphis traffic was absolutely terrible. At some point, I checked to see how our flights were doing. Sadly, our first flight was going to be so epically delayed, if we were very very lucky, we’d have a whole ten minutes to catch our connecting flight in Houston. I poked around for other flights. “Luckily” it looked like a later flight through Dallas was also spectacularly delayed and might be a backup option for us.
We arrived at the airport and waited patiently as a friendly Southwest desk agent moved us to four of the last five seats on that flight through Dallas. We had a stopover but didn’t change planes, so there was no chance to miss a connection. Hooray! Alas, that flight was so, so, so delayed both in Memphis and in Dallas that it was around 2:00 in the morning before we managed to get home. We were exhausted, sure, but we made it home and so did our luggage, and we didn’t have to sleep in an airport, so I’m gonna tally it as a win.
Sean and I both worked the next day, but we did allow ourselves to sleep in a bit. It would have been disastrous otherwise. On New Year’s Eve, after a laid back dinner, we made the kids mocktails and the grownups cocktails and rang in the new year together. Luckily, the 1st was a day off. After our crazy December, we needed it!
