Just Chillin'

I realize I haven't said much in the past few weeks. We've been amazingly busy but yet not. Christmas time and activities always take up more time than one expects, but we still managed to keep it fairly calm and controlled. Both Alex & I thought of some foods we'd like to try, so I looked up recipes and made something new, different, or out of the norm almost every day. Some of them turned out better than others, but it was fun to try new things.

As was not a surprise, video-game-aholic Alex spent as much time as possible on various games over the break. I did force him to read a book, too, just to break it up a little. I also forced him to play some games that I could play as well. I'm an old-school gamer who likes the basic arcade game type things. The adventure games that take hours and hours... not so much. I understand other people like them, and I enjoy watching others play them, but they are too much for me. They go too long, and generally I have a hard time with the 3D depth-perception images. But we played some 2-player games I could handle for some fun bonding time. Then, since he was kept whomping me on the video games, we got out some "old-fashioned" games one day. We played Battleship (I won both games) and Racko (I won 3 in a row) and then he wasn't quite so smug! Unfortunately, most board games play better with more than 2 people. We do have some computerized 'board games' that he suggested, but I was electronic'd out by then.

Christmas Day was fun. When he was little, I started a tradition of making him hunt for a present. It is usually a 'big' present. That might be size, or it might just be of importance. But when he opens one gift, he gets a clue. When he was little, it just told him to go look in place X for the next clue, whereby he would be told to go to place Y, etc. As he got older, the clues started to be actual clues he had to figure out. This year, they were almost riddles. Some he got much too quickly, but some took him a little while to figure out. All told, it took him almost an hour to find the Guitar Hero World Tour set. Then it took about 90 seconds to rip it open, pull out the drum set, and start playing it!

New Years continued our laid-back approach. We just stayed home and chilled by ourselves. There was a dessert I made for a party last year that Alex remembered and wanted again. I'll post that recipe later. We had the special dessert, jumped from Fox to NBC to ABC for various New York coverage, and just welcomed the new year quietly. It was different from how we normally do things, but it was nice.

I hope you had a great end of the year yourselves!