Christmas

We had a lovely, if totally overwhelming, Christmas.  We kicked off the formal festivities with the traditional grandparent lunch.  

 After the kids spent Christmas Eve at the jelly bean factory, we got them dressed and ready for church.  In the interim we swapped out our refrigerator and dishwasher while getting ready to host 33 for dinner.  I going to go on record as not recommending doing those two things on the same day.

 We started dinner with our traditional Cheese Course D'Eric.

 We had bourbon marinated pork tenderloin and managed to squeeze all 33 in our back room.

 After dinner we had the usual reading of the Night After Christmas though Eric did the honors this year not Zeke.  We also added a new tradition - "Ding Dong and Dash" - a game played by our guests and one of my daughters (ehhem - ANNA) while the adults were busy totally neglecting them.

 Christmas morning we woke up to a very cold house.  Turns out our heater was broken - the case of the cracked Nest has yet to be solved.  The girls woke up early.  The boys slept in until 7:30.  The girls nearly lost it but let their brothers get their beauty rest.

 Santa had been there.

He brought each kid a scooter...

 and some other stuff.

 Most importantly, he brought them a teepee.  Big hit.

 As were the scooters.

 Conveniently we had a full scooter race track courtesy of the party the night before.

 Sarah Jane was pretty excited about her new clothes - some boots, jeans and a vest (from Nana and Papa) - we might be entering a new era.

Anna on stage and other December updates

We've had a lovely December.  We started with a baby shower for Aunt Whitney.  The girls made cucumber sandwiches with cookie cutters.  I think this counts as my Christmas cookie making this year.

We are very excited to welcome Baby Boer.  And not just because it gave me an excuse to get sucked into Pinterest depths that I had never visited before.

That evening we celebrated Hanukkah at the Ganes' for the 33rd year in a row.  The candles were lit, the songs were sung. Miraculously no one threw up in the middle of dinner.

El Nino has made its appearance.  We had a magnificent 7 min storm and woke up to find the road full of hail from the night before.  Fingers crossed this translates into lots and lots of snow!

We got our tree in our usual totally incognito style.  Absolutely no one notices when you ride down the street with four kids and a tree in a bike...

We decorated.

 Anna's class performed at the holiday assembly.  This kiddo likes being on stage.

Nana and Papa were there too.  

Merry almost Christmas!

HarryPotterFrozenPalooza

We capped off our girls' birthdays with a Harry Potter Frozen extravaganza on Saturday.  We started birthdays the first week in August with an East Coast Hoverman family celebration, peaked at birthday WEEK in Tahoe for Smuesby/Smoer/Smiener/Smitherman celebrations and then capped it off with the friend party on Saturday.  I'm so done with birthday.  Except of course for Dave's which is right around the corner...

At four o'clock on Saturday we welcomed the first guests. We had 26 kids - 14 for SJ, 10 for Anna (though some defected to the other party) and Eli and Roby.  Anna had picked Frozen as her theme (again) and SJ went with Harry Potter.

Frozen cake was two cakes, one plopped on top of the other!

SJ made Quidditch goal posts out of chop sticks

In "Arendale" (the small TV room) we had snowflakes and dress up clothes, in "Gryffendor Tower" (the big TV room) we had stars.

Anna's kids made crowns.

Anna with her best school buds in the motliest collection of Elsa dresses in Berkeley

SJ's kids painted wands which I'd made the night before out of large chopsticks, 50 glue gun sticks and several large blisters on my hands.  The wands were passed out by Mr. and Mrs. Olivander (Zeke and Grandma) aided by SJ's careful labeling of each wand as containing either Unicorn Tale, Phoenix Feather, Hippogriff Teeth or Shooting Star Dust.

Waiting for their wands at Olivander's Wand Shop

Mr. Olivander

Just as I realized that providing 26 kids with long pointy things with which to run pell-mell around the house was probably not the brightest idea I'd ever had, we started the movies and experienced a blessed moment of calm.

And then we realized that we were roughly 40 minutes into a four hour party and I started to panic.

Dave headed out and returned with 6 double cut pizzas.  We paused the movies and they ate.  That took about 7 minutes.  It was 6:10.  We restarted the movies and the Frozen room, already restless, appeared near combustion.  As soon as Frozen was over, we whipped those kids out, sang, blew out the candles and ate cake.

Singing for Anna

The boys, as attendees of both birthdays, got double cake

It was 6:35.  Thankfully Harry Potter was still going.  We opened Anna's presents and then the Frozen kids either braved the end of Harry or communed with our chickens.  Thank goodness for the chickens.

At 7:30 Harry ended, the big kids filed out and we had our second singing, candles and first bite of cake.

Picture below is better but I love Eli's face in this one

At that point, chaos was in full swing but thankfully the parents started to show up and we siphoned them off one by one as Sarah Jane opened her presents.

Everyone was happy and also totally exhausted.  Next year two parties, two separate weekends...

And, in case you were curious, last year's birthday party here, and 6 and 4 is here

LAST Berkeley Hills First Day

The boys headed off to the Blue Room today, our last ever first day of school at Berkeley Hills.  They woke up very excited, jumped into the new outfits we'd laid out last night (a Batman shirt for Eli and a Superman shirt for Roby) and their new kicks (Pumas of course, these guys ONLY wear Pumas.)

They raced downstairs, gobbled breakfast, grabbed their lunches out of the fridge and then patiently sat outside (on their own volition) to wait for me to take their pictures.  These guys KNOW the first day drill.

The girls were a bit less amazing as they adjusted to sharing the back-to-school spotlight; sharing the spotlight, not their forte.  But everyone pulled it together and convened outside for the second annual photograph.  Hard to believe that next year we will just have one day and everyone will have their own sign!

The boys and I popped into the car and headed up the hill (the girls immediately reversed back into distress and had to be hauled into the house.)  There was one moment of trepidation when we arrived and some tightly held hands but then we found Teacher Kris and some blocks and all was well.

On our way to school, admiring their shoes

Blocks with Teacher Kris

At pick up the boys reported on their day.  They ate all their lunch, they had fun "play, play, playing", they didn't like sitting quietly for circle time and Teacher Lisa did NOT dress up like a penguin.  They have been talking about Teacher Lisa dressing up like a penguin all summer so that was a bit of a disappointment but Roby reasoned that she wouldn't do it every day and Eli concurred with a very grownup "Yah."

Roby, home from school, still admiring his shoes