Holidays wrap-up [elongated version]

Back at home, after having spent seven of the eight nights around Christmas and New Years sleeping out of home. Spent the 22nd through the 26th in Connecticut for Christmas with Cathleen's family, and the the 27th through the 30th in Yorktown for a belated Chanukah gathering with my family. The schedule was roughly as follows:

22nd: Drive to Bloomfield. Participate in Claudia and Walter's annual Caroling Party. Eliza spent almost an hour sitting next to Walter at the piano, quietly toying with the right side of the keys, and pushing away Walter's hand any time he tried to play the high notes. Earlier in the day we went sledding in the back, and discovered that Max had turned into this kid who loved the snow, loved sledding, loved playing around in the snow. Parenting doesn't just allow you to enjoy your kids' lives, it allows you to relate back to your own childhood; as we sped down the hill in the toboggan, I channeled the rush I would feel sledding down the Lim/Zuliani hill as a kid. Loved it. Regrettably, our digital camera spent the night of the party outisde. On the snow. In the rain.

23rd: Attended church service at the Unitarian church Claudia and Walter like to attend (Walter played the music for back-to-back services). I spent most of the service down in the playroom with Max, Eliza and Alani. We dined at Macaroni Grill afterwards, and then hung out at the house.

24th: Went sledding again, but the snow had frozen over from the previous day's rain, and the hill was slick and fast. I brought Max and Alani halfway up the hill and, early in the descent, I discovered that I could neither slow down nor control the toboggan. We wound up hitting a bump and spinning around backwards. "This," I thought, "can not end well." The next bump jammed the edge of the toboggan, and Max and Alani turned into projectiles. As I held the two crying kids on my lap, I unconvincingly tried to sell them on "wasn't that crazy and fun?" Cathleen and I then built them a snow fort that they didn't use at all. Late in the day we went to (Great) Aunt Catherine's for tea. It was a bit stressful this year, with Max hyped up on a combination of sleep deprivation and cookies, running around and being loud (like a four-year-old), but Aunt Catherine remained unfazed and as charming as ever, and I had an interesting talk with her son Steven about the hot air balloon ride that he and Sheila took for their 50th wedding anniversary. Later that night, back at the house, the adults exchanged gifts. I presented my "spring subscription to BAM" gift to Cathleen by way of a Mad-libs which pretty much worked.

25th: At Claudia and Walter's, we sleep in a humongous bed. Max loves that bed, and it is the only place that we allow him to sleep in bed with us. That morning, Cathleen got up with Eliza at around 6:30, and I remained in bed with Max until he woke up around 40 minutes later. As consciousness slowly washed over him, I quietly asked him, "do you know what today is?" He didn't jump up, or even perk up. He just looked at me and replied with a question: "I wonder if Santa left us two notes (in response to the one that he and Alani wrote the night before)?" I then got out of bed and began to get dressed. Max remained in bed and told me that he wasn't quite ready to get up. A couple of minutes later he announced that he was ready. Having never celebrated Christmas as a child, I have no personal experience with the "wake up early and run downstairs to rip open gifts" phenomenon that one sees in Christmas movies. Chanukah's a night-time event, and so the excitement of gift opening is preceded by the tension-killing wait for the sun to set. But here was Max, content to lounge in bed for a few more minutes before calmly going downstairs to check out what gifts lay in wait. I thought that was cool. He was less cool by the time the small cadre of guests arrived for Christmas dinner, but a good dinner was had nonetheless. Ann Chilton still makes a mean trifle.

26th: Woke up, packed and drove home. Unpacked slightly. When I turned in for bed, Max was asleep in our room, on the floor, and I spotted a bedbug crawling across his pillow. I killed it, and then brought out the vaccuum. Still wound up with three bites on my right arm by the next morning. Those motherfuckers.

27th: Woke up, packed and drove up to Yorktown late in the afternoon. Mike and T and the kids were already there; Lorri and John et al. arrived later that evening. Eliza is obsessed with Jacob and Ryan and if one of them was not paying her constant attention, she would stand and shout one of their names repeatedly until due attention was provided. But damn if she is not cute doing so.

28th: We packed into cars, drove to Croton and took Metro North into Manhattan, to then head up to Rockefeller Center to see The Tree and other sights. It was, in civil engineering terms, crazy-ass crowded. Max, despite his firm urban roots, does not like thick crowds, and so he began yelling at all of the people to leave New York City. It is with great pride that I note that he has developed a precocious distaste for tourists. Maybe we'd like you better, people, if you didn't stand in the middle of the sidewalk. Duh. We also saw the Penny Harvest at Rockefeller Center, where NYC schoolkids -- Max among them -- had collected $1 million in pennies to be used for charitable causes. Thems a lot of pennies.

29th: We exchanged presents for the kids in the morning, and then Mike, John and I headed off with the kids to the local bowling alley. Other than some technical upgrades, that place has not changed in 30 years. Oh shit, I have become a guy who can say "that place has not changed in 30 years." Oh well. Max was pretty much wasted by this point. With the exception of the night of the 26th, he had been losing on average 2 to 3 hours of sleep each night for a week (getting to bed late, not sleeping in late), and then had been playing at full pace with his beloved cousins non-stop. At the bowling alley, it all came crashing down. There was impudence, defiance and eventually screaming. With a crying Max hanging onto my left arm, I still managed to bowl a strike in one frame. That night the adults exchanged gifts. Lorri and John gave me, inter alia, a stuffed Giardia doll. You know, something to cuddle with when I want to reminisce about crapping away 13 pounds of my bodyweight in a month's time.

30th: Apres breakfast, we packed up and headed over to the cemetery to visit my dad and grandparents' graves. Lorri figured out that she is four years younger than my mom was when my father died, a fact that drove home how young he -- and we -- all were when he died. Or maybe it drove home how old Lorri is? Probably the former. We then poured into our respective cars and departed. Not "departed" in the traditional cemetery sense. We all went home. I think that it is interesting that as notably different as I am from the remainder of my family, how happy I am when we are all together. And it is not just that I cannot get enough of my nieces and nephews. I come home from family gatherings exhausted because we adults insist on staying up late talking with each other. Imagine! We are a pretty lucky family. I stayed up that night to watch the final football game of the regular season, between Indy and Tennessee. I don't care about either of these teams, but it was in this game that I dropped out of first place in my winner-takes-all ($350) season-long NFL Pick 'Em pool. I led the pool all season, until the last game (of over 200 games) of the entire season. I suck that much.

31st: I woke up illin, probably a healthy dose of actual exhaustion. I tried to rally for a family dinner party at friends' house, but I left 30 minutes into the shindig, leaving Cathleen behind to contend with both of our kids and dinner party conversation. I was in bed well before midnight, the first New Years that I didn't witness the ball drop or the clocks change in close to 30 years. Here's to 2008...