Author: Doris

Vince and Edda were in their first Christmas pageant. Vince had a speaking role, he was cast as the innkeeper, with a wife and a daughter (both were older and taller than he was). He had the famous line – “I’m sorry, there is no room at the inn…” As we were driving to church this morning, he admitted that it was hard to have a wife. Why? I dunno. Here he is considering the strawberry cream cheese he put on his bagel.

Edda was a sheep in the stable. I’m not sure how excited she was about being a sheep, but I was pretty excited that I got to play her shepherd which is, of course, a metaphor of our roles in real life. Edda can be pretty loud sometimes, especially when everyone else is being quiet, so I was half hoping that she would be asleep during the play, but perhaps some holy spirit was watching out for us as she made it through the 30 minutes that she was on stage wide awake (not entirely thrilled) and hardly a peep (or a Baaaaa!)

These are photos from rehearsal yesterday, I wanted to share a photo of Mary being a little bit silly!

I am so lucky! I get to babysit these beauties during the Xmas holidays. I think it will be fun having 4 dogs, 2 kids and 2 in-laws, 1 husband and 1 tadpole in the house.

Last night we bundled up and headed out to downtown DC for Jeremy’s office Xmas party. In past years, it had been kind of a casual affair, good food, but usually 5-10 kids milling around. This time, it was in some sort of fancy – Dupont Circle restaurant. It was so fancy it had a tree with tea lights inside the restaurant.

And as it turned out that Vince and Edda were the only children in attendance. And I might have been the only one wearing a T-shirt with an astronaut on the front. Oh well. I had a good time (one glass of free wine and I’m automatically having a good time), and the restaurant entertained the kids with cookies that they could decorate with sprinkles prior to baking.

Edda said hello to a bunch of Jeremy’s coworkers who haven’t seen her since the last Xmas party and they all marveled how much taller she’s gotten (one person even said that she’s almost as tall as me! Yipes!)

Brrrrr…. It’s cold around here.  Keep warm!

We discovered Justin Beiber’s new song just the other day. Alas, we don’t learn about these teen heartthrobs via Edda as she often keeps her own feelings of teen pop admiration very much under wraps – rather we learned about the new Beiber tune via an NPR story. The jist of the story is just that this particular Beiber song did not make it very high on the Billboard charts, but it is the #1 viewed video on YouTube of all time with 400 million hits. That’s like almost half a billion views. And we added our two or three hits ourselves.

Here’s Jeremy learning the moves. To augment our standard couple-dom repertoire of holding hands and hugs and good-bye kisses – we are adding the pointing followed by two thumps to our chest with our fist to indicate affection.

Vince’s moves –

I find this photo amusing – Vince (with glint in eye) is trying to include Edda in the family dancing by picking her up and moving her with the music. Edda is not pleased. In the background, Jeremy is intently studying Bieber’s moves and trying to imitate.

My mom’s arthritis in her thumbs is acting up so my dad volunteered to cook for our weekly Friday night dinner. It’s not often you see Dad in front of a stove stir-frying.

Vince’s hair is getting so long and unwieldy that we’ve had to implement a daily hair-care regiment which involves washing and combing. Ah, the injustice of it all! Unfortunately, Vince doesn’t really have a great example to follow – Edda and I do not spend a lot of time on our hair and we both manage to keep our hair relatively tangle free. Vince always cries when I try and comb his hair and then I threaten to cut it all of and the cries turn to whimpers and he says he doesn’t want his hair cut.

The next day, we went to a classic NY diner for some eggs and home fries with Scott, Kiki’s godson from Austin, TX.

I had to document our parking space (free street parking! Unheard of!) – we actually had to ask a local if it was really, really free.

We went and saw the famous Macy’s Christmas window displays

And we went to find THE Macy’s Santa, but the line was very long and you can’t see Santa from the line and so I just got a photo of an elf 🙂