I got an Amazon Gift Certificate from Aunt Marcia for Christmas, which I used to buy Photoshop/Premiere Elements, which I used to put together this video. More details later. Let’s just say that Anna and Tara scored HUGE this year.

This was the Christmas of animatronic toys. Santa brought Lucky the Amazing Puppy and an “Knows Your Name” Winnie-the-Pooh. Tara received the equivalent Dora the Explorer doll and Grandpa Ken got her a mechatronic bear that reads stories. It’s all very cool, but sometimes odd to hear extra voices in the house. The girls just had an absolutely amazing haul of toys; all the relatives were very generous as always, but Santa was also extra-generous this year, and Jennifer made sure that Santa had an up to date list of what Anna wanted. As you can see in the video, Anna just about became unhinged with excitement; note Tara piping in “Happy Birthday to You!” with her usual tuneless cheer.

Tomorrow I’m aspiring to put together the Christmas letter and maybe even a little video to accompany it. This week has been very laid back with Jennifer and I both off work, the nanny on vacation, and Jen’s mom visiting. The girls love it, but I see a rough transition to the daily grind ahead once Grandma heads out and school starts back up.

Life is too short to blog. At least it has been lately. Things have been terribly busy at work, as usual, and our home has been in disarray for weeks. Every day there are one or two packages on our doorstep, and the pile at the door is now as tall as I am. I’m not complaining, but when you don’t have time to unbox Christmas presents, what does that say about how busy you are? Sending Christmas presents? Ha. This morning we’re sending the kids over to a friend’s house so that we can convert the big pile of boxes into a treeful of presents.

Further, I’m coming down with a cold. Tara has had it for a few days, and it doesn’t seem very pleasant. She and I haven’t been sick in a while.

Jennifer and I have independently been sorting through the years’ photos and video. There’s a lot of good stuff there and I hope to get some slideshows together during the week we have off. I’ve given up on the crashtastic Photodex Proshow for putting my photos on DVD. I just bought the Photoshop/Premiere Elements bundle, and it only crashes so far when you try to import 8 GB worth of MJPEG videos. I’m trying now to transcode them to MPEG2 first to see if that works better.

Finally, Happy Birthday to my niece Lily, who turned zero this week.

Today is Easter, or in spanish, “Dia de Poner Peso.”¹ We hid jelly beans around the house, which Anna found and promptly ate within 37 seconds after waking up this morning. Even Bear had her own easter basket. The jelly beans didn’t look particularly safe to give to a one-year-old, so Tara absolutely crushed a Peep instead.

I went on a cooking tear this morning, making a fresh spinach and mushroom omelette for breakfast, chicken soup for dinner, and a chocolate souffle for dessert. I’ve never made a souffle before, but I make merengue like nobody’s business, so I suspect it will turn out fine. This morning I also bought a computer online, which should probably arrive while Jennifer is gone. My current computer is three years old, and it just can’t keep up with the demands of processing the images out of my camera. The new one is a dual-core pentium with two gigs of RAM. I’m hoping for a 3x speedup over my current machine. I also have a new tripod head in the mail which will replace the two lame ones I already have. I always regret going cheap on my gear.

After the kids wake up from nap, I’m going to take both of their monthly pictures, both way late.

For the last couple days, we have been working on planning out the next couple months of mayhem. Next week, Auntie K. and Uncle T. are going to visit, followed by Jennifer going to Singapore for a week and a half, leaving me with both girls, a bunch of appointments, and a fairly busy time at work. Also, we will have Anna’s birthday, Mother’s day, our eleventh anniversary, a trip to Disneyland, and a joint party for Anna and her buddy K. coming up by the time June rolls around. In June there are sure to be a bunch of birthday parties in addition to my birthday and Father’s Day and a trip to the midwest. I shudder to think of the the weekend last summer when we attended four of the six birthday parties to which we were invited. We’re not doing that this summer.

At the moment I’m enjoying a little bit of the calm before the storm, though I suspect I’ll see Jennifer gaining speed and flying around the house getting ready for her trip.

¹ Day of Gaining Weight

I’m not going to apologize for the long stretch between posts, because while on vacation I have been so relaxed as to be practically gelatinous. You try putting together two coherent sentences when you’re a big amorphous blob of goo. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

I’m straining to think of what it was we were doing on Christmas. Oh that’s right, flying on a commercial airline in coach with two young children. I realize now that I was insane last year, and shame on you all for not having mentioned it to me sooner. Actually the trip was not nearly as bad as it could possibly have been. Anna was astoundingly well behaved on the plane, quietly attached to her DVD player and the blessed video Prozac contained therein. Tara was not so much misbehaving as failing to meet the “all children must be above average” standard we have here at We’re So Tired. Thus, she needed to be constantly entertained for the entire second leg of our flight. If she were inclined to recognize celebrities, I could have pointed out that sitting in my row were none other than Aretha Franklin and Barry Bonds. At least I think they were–since each of them occupied 140% of a coach class seat, I had to stand up periodically just to inhale, and was therefore a little woozy for most of the flight.

Upon reaching Grandma D.’s house at long last, we basically took over the entire house, littering it with suitcases, photographic equipment, chew toys, wrapping paper, clothes, and art supplies. In an effort to keep us outside, Grandpa T. promptly set the pool heater to “simmer,” but this only distracted us long enough to get out all the beach towels and leave them all over the house.

Two days later Auntie K. and Uncle T. arrived, bringing with them yet more presents and an excuse to litter the house with wrapping paper again. Some days later there was an large family gathering of the relatives who are now local¹. We all had too much to eat and were at this point just tearing wrapping paper into confetti straight off the roll just for fun. Or there may have been presents, I can’t remember at this point.

On one evening, Jennifer and I went out with Uncle T. and Aunt K. to a bar, where sat and talked and drank. Had we done this in any other part of the country¹, we would have sat around talking about times past and then look at the younger people around us, currently enjoying the sort of activities we were reminiscing about and realize just how how old we are. This being Florida¹, we sat around talking about times past and then looked around at the grandmas and grandpas using their AARP discount on body shots, and realized just how old were are.

Days later, we began our vacation-within-a-vacation, taking a trip to the Kennedy Space Center, and spending two nights in an oceanfront hotel on Cocoa Beach. The Space Center is very impressive, but we were disappointed by the lack of snooty restaurants in the area. We hauled our good clothes 2,000 miles across the country, and darn it, we wanted to get dressed up and have a rude waiter bring us overpriced food. We settled for a place with good food and a casual atmosphere, and wore our good clothes anyway. Back at our room, we sat on the balcony on the top floor of our nearly empty hotel, looking over the empty beach and listening to the waves.

(to be continued)

¹ All midwesterners are required to move to Florida when they get old. Really. It’s the law.