Christmas

This winter has been scary warm - which, although terrible for the planet, is great for my mental health! We've been able to enjoy so much time outside with temperatures as high as 70+ in December!!  As soon as we got back from Thanksgiving we hurried to chop down a tree and get it decorated before we left town.  Aunt Mary recommended a new farm for us to visit which turned out to be a great idea and - armed with hot apple cider - we hunted around for the perfect tree. As usual, Carlos is the most particular about the tree specifications while the rest of us enjoy the scenery and then pressure him to hurry up.  We ended up with a nice tree and a fun adventure.  Because we didn't buy the tree from our school, we bought many other things and charlie spent hours volunteering at the school christmas tree sale. He and his friend Jack literally spent 4 hours sweeping the playground to keep up with the mess from all the trees being carted off.  
Once we got the tree decorated we made a massive ginerbread house and 50+ cookies and invited the boys' friends over for decorating. It didn't go exactly as planned. Diego and his friends worked hard on their decorating, but Sofia just sat there eating cookies and Charlie and his friends just absconded with candies. They weren't so interested in the decorating part....I had offered to have 1 kids sleep over, but then word got out and we ended up with 4 extra bodies strewn across the 3rd floor.  It was actually a lot of fun.  That said we had a serious night owl and an early bird so it was a bad compbination for sleep.  Sometime around 11 we had to threaten to drive one kid home if he didn't go to sleep and then by 6am one kids woke everyone up.  As an early Christmas present I had found a game table on craigslist and so the kids played non-stop on the miniature billiard table. They love it!

We tried to cram in all the Christmas activities we could before leaving so I also took them to National Harbor to see the crazy ice sculptures, decorate yet another gingerbread house and see all the fun decorations. They loved it and really wanted to spend the night in the hotel. I of course couldn't wait to get out of there....A more fun outing was going to the White House with the Ralleses to see the decorations. Big Bill has a great view of the tidal basin (and a nice tree for the holidays).

We made it to Reno for Christmas and were very lucky to arrive before a big snowstorm.  That meant we got a white christmas and the kids could go skiing! Veronika took Charlie and Carlos took Diego up the mountain and after a few days they got so much better. I got to join one afternoon - after 10 years of no snowboarding!!! - and had so much fun. I loved to see Diego go down the slopes with no help.  By the last afternoon they started taking little jumps. Crazy kids.  Unfortunately I was so enthusiastic about my venture to the mountain that I took photos, put my phone back in my pocket and then....forgot to zip up...The kids on the chairlift behind us were screaming, but I had no idea what they were saying. Turns out my phone fell off the chairlift.   Somehow it was found, turned in and I was reunited with it the next day. That was really lucky because in an attempt to stop loosing things I got a phone case that holds my ID and credit card so I would have had no ID and no money!!!

We made our annual virtual christmas card to overload everyone on pictures of the kids: http://bit.ly/2015taftvazquez

As I look back over the year it's amazing how the kids have grown and changed. Charlie is becoming a very thoughtful, well-rounded and diligent young person. I admire him very much. He works hard and is competitive, but values his friends more than winning (which has caused issues with one of his best friends this year who wants to win over anything else). He is diligent and respectful at school and his teacher love having him in class. He works hard - he was the first in his class to complete the math curriculum - but loves to have fun once school is over. He has a group of very close friends who are all extremely nice.

Charlie and his Capitol Kicks champs

Diego is still my angel baby.  Carlos and I both worry about him being stuck in the middle. He is overshadowed by a confident older brother and a tyrannical younger sister. He is the only one of the three who can play by himself for hours - he loves legos, building, vehicles, play figures and drawing.  He loves his teachers - past and present - and I've been told by multiple mothers that Diego is by far the teacher's favorite. I think it is his scrumptious cheeks and contagious giggle. He hasn't been as quick to learn to read as Charlie and I worry he may be a bit dyslexic. It's been hard to get much alone time with him to work on his reading/writing given Sofia's constant demands. In any case Diego shines bright for me.

Sofia, Sofia, Sofia. I admire her so much. She is more strong willed than the rest of us put together and is the boss of the household.  The below comic sums up how we often feel about her:

She is super self-sufficient - she gets herself dressed (multiple times a day) though the clothes are often on backwards and inside out.  She had a record destructive week recently (broke or ruined at least 1 thing everyday) and Cici's mom got me thinking when she said "Puppies destroy things when they are bored." I'm thinking that maybe Sofia needs more stimulation so school will be good (if she gets in). She can already spell her name, but needs some help counting after twelve..."twelve, thirteen, nineteen, eleven, sixteen...".  She sure is a force within our family.

Thanksgiving

Despite the fact that Carlos hates NY, we had a really fun thanksgiving weekend there. That said, we did get a classic welcome to NY by getting sideswipped by a taxi about 100 feet after getting through the Lincoln tunnel.  The taxi cut us off and Carlos went after him. A police happened to be close to where his passengers were being dropped so our midnight arrival turned into 1am as the cops processed the incident. The kids all woke up and were so excited about the whole thing they didn't go back to sleep until 2am....

working up a thanksgiving appetite

Thanksgiving day was full of preparations and enjoying the beautiful weather.  With 8 little kids running around it was tough for everyone to sit down at once, but we all enjoyed the meal in rounds. On Friday we went to the big apple circus. Sofia was scared to death and made me stand in the back for much of the time, but overall it was a lot of fun and the kids loved it. Fortunately it's mostly acrobatics instead of animal abuse...

The kids idolize Tio Charlie so they wanted to spend sometime with him alone. We dropped them off and enjoyed a surprisingly quiet brunch with highschool friends.  While the kids adore Tio Charlie they were pretty judgmental of his apartment: "this is SO small," "do you have another house?" "this isn't fancy and the stairway smells!"  Sofia especially loves Tio Charlie - on the car ride home she was fast asleep and started screaming "WHERE IS TIO CHARLIE?????"

On Sunday we went to my aunt Phyllis' mom memorial service. It was a very nice service and so wonderful to see much of the family. Charlie was the only one of my kids who sat through the service and he seemed to think about it a lot because on the car ride home he wanted to talk about it. He also wanted to understand how everyone in the family is connected to us and what it means to be part of the "family" - cousins, aunts, aunts' moms, etc.

Legoland discovery center was close by so we took the kids for one final round of fun before heading home.


The best part of the weekend was seeing how much fun the kids had together. They played every iteration of spy games they could think of. They even gave each other spy tests. I'm going to try and infiltrate to break their code and spy on them next time.

Pretty fun time.

Warm Fall Weather

It has been a busy but fun fall.  We had beautiful weather for Halloween and enjoyed a walk through the neighborhood starting in NE and down crazy East Capitol. I love Halloween and a beautiful weather amplifies the community fun. Charlie was a vampire with slicked back hair. He had no need for fake teeth because he has no front teeth so a natural fang look.  Diego was Darth Vader though he didn't like wearing his mask. Sofia was a lion with face paint that stayed on for 30 seconds before she smeared it all over. I tried to be Medusa with rubber snakes crawling around my head, but I mainly got blank stares. Carlos was a skeleton that scared all of us.

We couldn't figure out why Sofia didn't want to participate in trick-or-treating until all of a sudden I felt her convulsing in my arms and in the middle of an extremely crowded sidewalk of kids she puked. For good or for bad, my reaction was to catch it in my hand so as not to spoil the poor kids passing by. I managed to get most it and run her to a nearby tree.  30 seconds later she was back to her normal feisty self marching up to doors yelling "trick-or-treat-I-want-canny!"  She and I headed home early to clean up and give out candy. We sat on the front stoop and anytime she'd see someone anywhere on the block she'd yell at them "hey nino, come get canny!"

Sofia certainly is a force within our family. She still screams and hits us when we annoy her, when she is tired or hungry or basically anytime someone tells her "no." Sometimes I talk her off the ledge; other times I put her in her room and walk away to take a deep breath. But we all (well maybe not Diego) adore her. She tries to be one of the big kids - following the pre-k kids around and doing whatever Charlie and Diego do. The boys like to sleep without a shirt so she insists on only wearing pajama bottoms too. Then again any reason to get naked continues to be a good reason in her book - even on the school playground.

Diego's teacher adores him, but I worry about him. Learning to read has been much more challenging for him than Charlie which is a good reminder that there is not set formula for them learning. Diego is an amazing builder, but building letters into words doesn't click. Sight words like "she" get recited back as "her". I know he'll read just fine eventually, but I get worried about how hard it is for him in the meantime. I think he knows he should be further along which breaks my heart. I don't want him to be anxious in kindergarten!  Charlie on the other hand is having a great academic year and likes his his teacher, Ms Farkas. The other day he read for 85 minutes straight (yes, he times himself).  Getting him to do anything sitting down for 85 minutes (other than maybe watch a movie) is nearly impossible.

Recent big news is that we closed on 1/2 a house! Nathan and Soogy own the other 1/2.  Carlos' sheer will power and persistence got this into reach and then Nathan and Soogy got us across the finish line. Nathan and family came down to see the place last weekend and we took advantage of the nice weather to bike around town. We went down the mall and across to Arlington National Cemetery. The kids got to see Big Bill's grave and then we biked up to explore the new property.


  It's going to be a fun project, but lots of work. Week 1 demo took care of most of the top two floors.  Look at this mess!

 I had a work meeting in Seville, Spain which was amazing. It was my first time to Spain and I really loved it - except the food...too much meat and fried food. But the wine and weather were great and the meeting was productive so that was a success. The only down side was that getting there and back took forever so it was a lot of work for Sandra, Carlos and my mom.