Christmas

For Christmas eve, we had our traditional Christmas Eve dinner of clam chowder in bread bowls, sang some Christmas songs around the piano, and reenacted the nativity before the kids were allowed to open one present each from a sibling.

Santa Claus stopped by during the night and dropped of stockings and presents while watching the traditional cheesy Christmas movies.

In the morning, the kids needed no convincing to play with their new Santa toys until it was time to open stockings and the rest of the presents.

Amber's parents gave us all giant slippers, which were a hit.

The kids did a great job getting each other presents.

Damon was so excited to get his own multi-tool and binoculars that he ran upstairs to get a belt he could hang them on.

Carmen has been obsessed with Redwall lately, and was very excited to get the Redwall cookbook.

There were lots of Lego sets to go around, from the Santa presents to Christmas trees in the stockings to the rocket launch set that knocked Damon over with excitement. Even Amber got in on the action this year.

The Itty Bitty craze is dying down a little, but they still made an appearance, with Star Wars Porgs in stockings, and these for the girls.

There were too many presents to mention, but everyone had a great time opening presents.

Olivia and Carmen both got new phones for Christmas. We had a clever plan where I was going to call and make the package ring. It didn't work, but they were still thrilled with the phones. Especially Carmen, since this is her first phone.

Eventually all the presents were unwrapped, and we spent the rest of the day playing with our new toys.

New flower beds

As an early Christmas present, Amber wanted to have the front flower beds redone. She had thought for years about how to do it herself, but we finally just payed some landscapers to do it for us.

It was only supposed to take a day or two but because of weather and other delays it ended up being about a week, but the final product looks great!

I didn't take a "before" picture, but you can see the improvement over the scrubland that was our previous garden beds in the picture from last year.

Gingerbread creations

We invited the DiValls over to make gingerbread creations because they wanted to learn how to do it.

The Divalls combined forces to make a giant house, while Miles made a castle, Damon a pirate ship, and Carmen a Christmas tree.

With all the extra people, Amber and I didn't have time to finish ours, so we did ours a couple days later.

Olivia was too cool to do hers with the other kids, so she finished decorating her Spanish Mission while we decorated ours.

I was very pleased with my finished Avengers Tower, complete with Iron Bear, Captain A-bear-ica, and Bulk.

Amber finally had time to do her own this year and created this beautiful Shoe House, including candy shoelaces and too many children.

Here's this year's complete set.

Thanksgiving

We were planning on getting together with the Bodily family again, but right before Thanksgiving someone in Miles's class got COVID and Miles was a close contact so we were advised not to have contact with anyone for two weeks. So we had Thanksgiving on our own, and Amber did a great job with the food.

The day after Thanksgiving we did our traditional activity of decorating for Christmas.

It was Peppers' first time seeing Christmas decorations, and she was very interested in examining them all.

She wasn't sure what to think of the train. She was scared for a while, then chased it a little, then just ignored it. But the kids had fun as always.

Halloween

As always, the hardest part of Halloween was getting the kids to decide what they wanted to be. And also as always, Amber did a great job getting costumes ready in time for the church Trunk-or-Treat a few days before Halloween.

Miles wanted to be a cardboard robot like one of the Roblox characters, and I had fun finding random electronics components I had saved over the years to add to it. Damon was a robber, Carmen was Cruella de Vil, and Olivia and Amber were the Lord of the Rings elves Arwen and Galadriel. I used my 3D-printed Eye of Agamotto to become Dr. Strange.

In the days leading up to Halloween, Amber made a couple spooky dinners for us to enjoy, like mummy pizzas, eyeball spaghetti, and of course, the brain jello.

They were well fed and ready to go trick-or-treating on Halloween.

They're all veterans now, and came home with a good haul.

San Antonio - Part 5 - Natural Bridge Caverns

For our last day, we decided to go see Natural Bridge Caverns, which we had visited four years ago and liked.

The opening is beneath a natural bridge, thus the name.

There were lots of cool formations to see as we got deeper into the cave.

Culminating in a very large cavern at the end of the tour.

Back at the rental, the kids enjoyed the frigid pool and arcade games one last time before we headed back to Houston.