Cute Baby Pics and more . . .

Let's be honest: this is what the six or seven readers of this blog really come here to see:

Now that your appetite for cuteness has been sated, we'll move on to the other stuff.

My sister Margo and her family came to visit us the week before Christmas.  She brought along my brother Daniel who is attending law school at Duke and had just finished his first semester of law school exams.  I'm sure that Jaime was enthralled as Daniel and I spent most of the first evening together reviewing how he had approached his Torts and Contracts exam questions ("Absolutely, you needed to just assume the existence of the contract, although without traditional consideration I hope you listed the elements of detrimental reliance . . . ").

While Margo's family and Daniel were visiting, our kids learned that their cousins were going to Disneyland later that week, and Kate used some advanced interrogation techniques to break Jaime down and find out that they, too, were headed to the Happiest Place on Earth (that's quite an audacious claim, when you think about it).  We managed to spend nearly the entire day there while only making it onto about half of the rides we had planned to ride - but at least the kids got to ride between rides in comfort:

Kate Kardashian hitches a ride on the Double Bob chariot

We did learn that Disney's interpretation of height does NOT include the height of one's hair.  Davis's faux hawk easily touched the bottom of the 40" height sign on both Star Tours and Big Thunder Mountain, but on both rides an eagle-eyed worker was able to jam a finger between Davis's skull and the sign and declared him too small.  I later learned that an easy fix for this is to head into the restroom and get a large stack of paper towels that you fold over once or twice and stuff into your kid's shoes.  He might not walk very well while he's in line, but apparently the Disney folk are much more accommodating to kids who walk with a limp than to kids who are just a bit too short.

"Happiest Place on Earth, says who?"

The kids were exhausted when we got to the car around 9:00.  I can't imagine trying to do two consecutive days of Disney fun.

Just a few photos to document that we did, in fact, celebrate Christmas this year.  The kids celebrated it by upwrapping presents, and not so much by cleaning up after themselves (as you can see by the photos below):

No, we don't let the kids ride bikes on the hardwood floors - at this point they didn't even know how to pedal

To try to combat the chaos, we issued a decree: if you want to play with one of your toys, you have to first put away the one you just finished using.  Only THEN can you move on to the next one.  Kate's solution to that decree was to tell us that she had not "finished" using the first toy but had only "paused" it.  Since we had made the rule about toys that the kids were finished using, she informed us, this rule didn't apply to her.  My response: she is now going to spend next semester with Uncle Daniel.

As you can probably deduce from the pictures, both Kate and Davis got bikes for Christmas.  I should have had Santa bring me a bike maintenance kit so I could follow them around tightening and loosening the things that need tightening and loosening.  Good thing that Kate only uses the coaster brakes on her pedals to stop herself (which, by the way, she immediately does whenever her rate of speed approaches that of a brisk walk), as I'm not entirely convinced that I assembled her front handbrake correctly.  We don't have to worry about Davis's bike going too fast; his wheels rub in about 7 spots, which has turned out to be a rather effective way of limiting his ability to kill himself.  The new house is perfectly positioned on a cul-de-sac that has only one other house, so we're not just mad at the kids when we tell them to "go play in the street."

We had a great Christmas dinner with friends who, like us, were not traveling to see extended family and had no extended family nearby.  Our friend John is an accomplished lobster diver: he actually caught enough Pacific lobsters off the coast near where we live for his wife Tracy to make lobster bisque for their church Christmas dinner party.  So we feasted like kings and queens on grilled lobster and on this little beauty that I cooked up:

We fell into our beds on Christmas night fat, happy and not at all ready to tackle taking down the tree and putting away all of the holiday decorations.  Those can wait until after I go back to work next week . . .