More Snow Days

We've had a lot of snow days this year.  Although I can't stand winter, I do secretly enjoy the indoor family days.  On Thursday we got enough snow that Sandra couldn't make it here so we played and played (aka trashed the house) all day.  We started the day by finding some extra wall paint and pieces of wood from the third floor construction zone and the boys went to work painting.  From there they created a fort in the living room, but then decided a mash pit might be more fun.  They found everything soft in the entire house - every pillow, every cushion, every blanket and every stuffed animal and dumped it on the living room floor.  They launched themselves from the barren sofa into the pillow pit.  We made a fire and toasted marshmallows.  Diego couldn't remember the word marshmallow so he kept referring to roasting "marshmush" or "mushrooms."  S'mores will now forever be marshmush around here.  And of course there was sledding and snowman building/destroying.

the living room mash pit

We thought we'd take advantage of the snow to go skiing over the weekend.  Carlos found a random place in WV which felt like another world, but the people couldn't have been nicer and the kids loved it.  They loved everything - right down to those crappy little machines that swallow your quarters and only sometimes spit out terrible trinkets and trash.  Charlie put his plastic "I'm-needlessly-killing-the-environment" toys into his treasure box when he got home.  We rounded Diego's age up a bit so that we could all go tubing on Saturday.  I was certainly more scared than they were.  While Charlie and Carlos went skiing on Sunday, Diego, Sofia and I spent the day in the pool, running the hotel hallways and clearing the outside furniture of snow....It was a fun time with the exception of all sleeping in one room - mainly because of Sofia.  For some reason she is nearly impossible to sleep with in the same room.  She was literally up from midnight to 3am wanting to play.  Only when I was absolutely sure that I was going to have a nervous breakdown did she finally pass out....

Sofia in her bathing suit!!!  she looked so cute. Diego took this photo

Our version of air hockey

For Valentine's day the kids tore open cards from Grandma and then used the stickers she sent to make us cards :).  They also got to work making and decorating cookies for Carlos (and themselves).   

Charlie dressed himself and this is how he came down for Valentine's Day

 

 It is a weird feeling to see my children surpass my current ability to do something.  Granted, I am totally "unmusical" so it's not very hard to surpass my abilities on the piano....Nevertheless, it was fun to watch Charlie play piano with his teacher last week: http://youtu.be/o-rWyHlysLg (also features Sofia grunting in the background).

A few more pictures of our indoor activities.

Watching the Olympics -- and ready for those ski jumps

Family Time

We had a nice and super family-centric weekend.  We went to the Georgetown men's basketball game at the Verizon Center to cheer on Diego's classmate's father who is one of the coaches.  It was us and 13,000 other people there to cheer them on.  I didn't realize how popular these games were.  Despite our nose bleed seats, we had a lot of fun.  Charlie was super into the game, but Diego lost interest after a  half-hour and wanted to wander the corridors.  Fortunately Georgetown won.  

From there we went around the corner for Chinese food and then rounded out the experience by stopping by for the $5 psychic reading.  Although we were in Chinatown this woman was not asian and when she came to the door Carlos and I had the same impression - maybe this was a front for a prostitution ring.   She closed the door on our faces, scurried around inside and then a few minutes later opened the door again and let Carlos in first with Charlie.  Diego and I had to wait in the "waiting room" which consisted of 2 chairs in the middle of a staircase.  As the door closed, Diego looked up at me, shook his head and declared "I am NOT going in there."  For $5 she did a brief palm reading.  It turns out Carlos is going to live until he is 87 and that there is a woman in my life who is very jealous of me!!  The thought of that cracks me up.  I thought for sure Carlos paid her extra to tell me positive things about him because when I walked in with Diego (who was convinced only after I promised a treat) she told me that my husband's business will do well within 5 months.  too funny.  He insists that he didn't feed her stories to tell me....

On Sunday Charlie "chefed" with me for a while and then decided to take on his own project.  He got every spice out of the cabinet, requested flour, oil and even opened up a random jar of tamarind, added some peanuts and mixed everything together.  He got out the tart molds, we sprayed them with pam and he filled them with his special sauce.  I cooked them at 350 for about 40 minutes and viola!  We even tasted them.  Not as disgusting as I would have thought watching what went into it.  He made a recipe as well in case he wants to replicate the magic another time....

 One of the highlights of this weekend was that we got Mark to bake some bread for us.  Perhaps this is what inspired Charlie's baking - look at these beauties:

Sofia is starting to have such a big personality and, now that she can get around, she loves to be part of the action.  If she hears the boys in the living room, she'll take off and scamper through the dining room (she takes a short cut under the table) and hurries right into their business.  She likes to stand at the train table, open the drawer and systematically put everything she finds in there into her mouth.  Often she'll crawl away with some toy sticking out of the side of her mouth.  This weekend she figured out she could go through the tunnel that Diego and Charlie like to use for their forts.  She spent the next 20 minutes crawling from one side to the other and back again.  pure magic to her.

I realized that I am almost incapable at getting upset at Diego. I'm not sure why, but probably a third is because I feel badly about him being stuck in the middle, a third is because he is so adorable and a third is because when I do tell him to stop doing something he gets so sad and retreats into his room.  He randomly says the sweetest things; this weekend he turned to Carlos and said "Daddy, you are my BEST friend in the whole world."  And other times he'll just randomly declare his love for us.  I worry that, because I'm not very strict with him, he won't concentrate very hard; when we try to practice his letters he loses interest halfway through the alphabet.  I'm hoping that he'll get Ms Santora for kindergarten who is quite strict and that she'll whip him into shape given that I am incapable....

Diego after 4 rounds of Hoot Owl Hoot this weekend

Year of the Horse

This weekend we had our post-holiday holiday party to ring in the Chinese New year.  One guest came in and actually asked if one of us was Chinese which was comical for many reasons, but mostly because of how un-authentic it was....right down to the oozing chocolate fountain!  Nevertheless we had a great time seeing everyone and ended up with way too many leftovers, as usual.  The most surreal/comical/painful part of the preparation was going to the Chinese grocery store in Virginia on Chinese New Year's Eve.  Bad idea!  Me and every person of Chinese descent were fighting the narrow aisles with crappy broken grocery carts.  For good or for bad, I couldn't understand what anyone was was saying to me (cursing at me?) or any of the labels.  Oddly, all the workers were hispanic....  Try picking out the right rice wine when this is what you are faced with:

A row of various rice wines, none of which had any english on the label...

Charlie and Diego helped me pack gold coins into little red envelopes and hang them on branches I made them collect during the polar vortex.  And they cut open the 150 fortune cookies I bought which came in individual bags!!


The kids had an eventful evening as well because they had a pseudo-sleepover.  Cici came to "sleep" here until the party was over.  "sleeping" didn't seem to be one of the main activities however.  We'd go up to check on them and all three of them would be coloring by the nightlight or crammed into the closet looking for some elusive item, or parading to the bathroom to get water.....Despite my annoyance at them still pitter-pattering around at 10pm, they were pretty cute.  They wrote each other notes in case one ever moved away so they could remember each other.  Cici wrote this "Diego you rook (rock) so do you charlie" and Charlie made her a folded note with a secret note inside which was decorated with a heart.  I hope to see more of this type of behavior and less of charlie's wrestling/fighting motif.  Finally around 11pm they all crashed.

Super Bowl sunday was fun too with our chili tradition at Lisa and Toby's house.  They have this rolling betting system and Charlie seems to win every year!  This year he won $20 of which only $5 seemed to get from his father to him.  The $5 promptly went into his treasure chest as he debated what to invest the money in...most likely pokemon or baseball cards he says....Sofia enjoyed herself too because there were three pre-teen girls there who fell over themselves giving her attention.  The 11 year old gave me her number so that she could come over for a playdate with Sofia :).   

Given the cold weather, we've been visiting various museums.  My favorite is the building museum - it is the perfect amount of open space for them to run around and cool activities for all three to enjoy.  The picture on the left is a (almost) family (outline) portrait of charlie, diego and me holding Sofia.  If you stand still the tetrus blocks fill in your outline, but as soon as you move they fall down.  Clearly Charlie did the best of all of us standing still....