Year: 2007

After Christmas, with everyone scattering homeward or to the jungles of Bolivia, Jeremy, Donald and the kids motored to upstate New York to spend a few days with Kiki and Kappa.

Along the way, the females of the group (Edda and Ruby) both had major post-Christmas dinner digestive issues which stunk up the whole car leaving the males wondering which one of the “I’m not telling because I can’t speak English, but I’m damn cute” females was responsible for making the car smell like a feed lot.

I, on the other hand, avoided the poopmobile and worked for a few days. I took the infamous Chinatown bus ($20 from DC-NYC) where I overheard conversations about illicit pharma transactions and coughed my way through stops in Baltimore, Philly and finally NYC.

I spent the evening with Karen, my college roommate, who broke a long tradition of eating out to cook a spaghetti dinner for me. I was very happy.

Jeremy spent the previous evening with his college roommate, Alan, and met his lovely wife and daughter.

I trudged into work today, still sick. Runny nose, coughing, low grade fever. What is with this flu? If I keep going at this rate, I will be well when I’m 92. I really miss being able to taste food.

Even though I’m the sickest I’ve ever been in years, it’s been a great Christmas.

We were sick. A number of people couldn’t eat due to upset tummies. But at least we had each other.

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Back home in MD. Everyone seems pretty darn sick. Hrm… I’m wondering what my odds are of coming out unscathed healthwise from this week… laff. Here’s Vince and I playing with Photo Booth. Merry Xmas!

Yesterday, while all of the other kids were opening their gifts, Edda protested a little bit.

Too loud! Too messy! Too many people! What’s with this fur trim on my dress?

Since some of the DC cousins are headed out of town for Christmas, we had a cousin-only pre-Christmas gift exchange this evening. (I still feel crappy, spent a lot of the day in bed). We were going to cook, but had Chinese takeout instead. I’m beat. There were so many, many, many gifts opened. There was the explanation of who exactly is Hannah Montana.

Argh – we’ve been sick all week. Fever, vomit, diarrhea. It was all there. I still stumbled into work since I needed to get some stuff done. Wed and Thurs, I did my best to keep myself far away from everyone else. During a meeting, there was a 30 minute break, I just lay down my head in the next chair and went to sleep. I also slept both ways on the train – one time I even caught myself drooling. Not a pretty picture. And everyday I went to sleep as early as possible. I think I’ve been in bed at 7:30 every night hence the lack of blog entries.

We stuck a dentist appointment in there as well. We found an awesome dentist just down the road from us who is willing to take a look at Edda’s teeth and actually clean them. Our dentist in Singapore actually shooed us away (no need to pay! really! just go elsewhere!) – barely looking in Edda’s mouth. So no cavities. Just a lot of plaque because we don’t brush her teeth well enough.

We have implemented this new activity – “Project Sisyphus” aka picking up after ourselves and keeping the house clean. This is not something we are good at or have a knack for, but since we have our babysitter coming to the house every single day, it would be nice not to have a pile of dirty laundry/used dish/discarded toy/uncapped marker/read magazines/pile of mail sitting in the same place for 2 weeks. Of course, once this project was implemented, we were all grouchier because I would get upset if Vince ate his sandwich in the living room or if socks were left next to doors or any one of a million things I didn’t care about before. Don’t worry, I’m sure soon enough we will return to our messy ways, but hopefully not until all the guests leave after Christmas.

Saturday – spent the day waiting for snow and ice that never came. I almost canceled out of a really nice dinner party Saturday night because of the deceptive weather men. Luckily, I didn’t listen and spent an enjoyable night without the family speaking “adult”.

But during the day, there was the park:

Sunday was the last day of the semester for Chinese school. There was a year end performance and potluck! Jeremy made yummy dumplings – with homemade dough!

Things are very exciting around here. Jeremy’s unpaid gig has been a lot of fun, but what is even more fun is that he’s starting a paid gig in the new year. The unpaid-ness of the old gig gave us the flexibility to get everyone used to our babysitter because he could bail on the unpaid gig at anytime and rush home in case of a kid-related mishap, but our sitter has worked out beautifully!

I’m really enjoying my job and getting into the groove. We are less involved with the kids’ schools, but it’s what it has to be for now to pull off our plan of actually moving out of my parents’ house some day. Um, what else? Oh yes, Christmas is coming soon and we are getting that festivus feeling.

The tree was up 2 weekends ago. Do you see the license plate hanging from the tree? From an old Toyota that Jeremy was driving when I first met him – ah, that little car had something like 20 horsepower.