Holiday Season 2011

As a busy mother it is always a little tricky to keep all of my plates spinning; I add Christmas and plates start to drop. Posting pictures this month was an easy thing to let go of, and now, Christmas Day afternoon I'm wresting with Blogger trying to figure out why it won't load half of my pictures from the past few weeks! Here are a few it would upload and I'm going to call it good enough.

Geoff had some meetings in San Francisco a few weeks ago so the girls and I tagged along for a few days in the city. I couldn't get our ice-skating pictures uploaded but the girls and Geoff zipped around Union Square on a perfectly mild afternoon.

We went to the Saint Francis Hotel to see a huge French gingerbread castle with a French gingerbread village surrounding it. Amazing.



The girls love walking through Macy's with all of its bling.

We had hot cocoa at The Top of the Mark, ate several times at a little French cafe by our hotel called Cafe de la Presse (whose baguettes and pan au chocolats were as good as any in France), joined our friends Tabreez and Maria and their son, Zadon, for dinner, and drove down to Los Altos to have lunch with our good friend Susan Mayer, and spend a few hours at the park with some of our favorite friends the Parrys (from Redmond) and Archibalds (from Harvard) who have become friends themselves. What a wonderfully small world!

Archibald, Parry and Davis kids

My dad and Babs came into town for a long weekend (although the few pictures of them won't upload! Grrr). They admired the girls' gingerbread house making.



And they attended the girls' Sing and Dance performance.

Poor phone-quality photos but that is Tennie singing a solo!

Adele and Ceci in action

Geoff's parents came to support the stars too

We had a Christmas dinner with all of our gathered grandparents and made our traditional Danish ableskivers. Yum! The girls treated us to some post-dinner theater about girls who only wanted to shop until they felt the true meaning of Christmas.


We had an early gift opening night with Geoff's parents.

Adele gave Poppop a mini marshmallow wrapped in several boxes as a joke

We moved out of our living space to make room for most of Geoff's siblings who will take our place in Auburn during Christmas, packed up our car and drove to Southern Utah to spend a few weeks with my mom. About 2 hours from her house Adele began to felt queasy. Six vomits later we arrived. Tennie and Ceci followed suit that night. It was a violent flu that lasted about 14 hours for each of them, and then it was over leaving the girls exhausted and weak. Luckily we adults didn't catch the bug. My poor mom. Joy joy! Oh, and I had a birthday in that lovely sickness.

Look who we ran into while doing a little last minute shopping!

We acted out Luke 2 last night before reading The Night Before Christmas and looking up Santa's whereabouts on Norad Tracks Santa. Lots of squealing...little sleeping.

Here comes Mary and Joseph into Bethlehem

Joseph looks on as Mary struggles with swaddling her newborn babe

He takes over the task as he sees Mary get frustrated

The angel appeared to the shepherd(s) (we had a small cast to work with)

The shepherd visits the baby Jesus (Mary went for a spa look after messing with her head veil for too long)

The wise men bring gifts

Before going to sleep Ceci left a note (one of many that were left) for Santa...


Another note asked for extra candy canes. This morning they woke up to this jackpot...

We were up at 6:00 this morning and experienced lots of excitement, hugging and squeals of delight. Merry Christmas!