Happy new year!

And Merry Christmas too, for that matter, a little belated. Hope everybody who reads this had a great holiday and is enjoying the start to the new year.

Well its been a while so this will be a monster entry, I'm taking my whole lunch hour to do it, and if I'm really good I might even update it with pictures when I get home tonight.

We had this pretty exciting social schedule all through December, at least exciting for us. We had sitters booked for 3 Saturdays in a row! We haven't gone out that much without kids since we didn't have kids. First up was the Ballard Christmas party, which was held at the Vancouver Aquarium - dinner, drinks and dancing and everything. That was really cool, what a great venue for a company party. The best part was the belugas who were having fun showing off for everyone. The other best part was that I met the wife of a colleague, and she works on the new underground train project that will link the Skytrain downtown with the airport. They really should have thought ahead when they decided to name their light rail transit system the Skytrain, how is that going to work when they finish the new links and half of the system is underground? Anyway, she has the coolest engineering job in the city digging all these massive tunnels with super cool equipment, and she said they were thinking of arranging a kids tour of the tunnels and the tunneling machine and she promised that me and Ollie would be invited. Yay!

Then a few days after that Ollie was sent home from daycare with the stomach flu. He threw up 4 times at daycare, once in the car on the way home, and twice again at home. It only seemed to last about 8 hours though and by bedtime he was asking for toast and then slept pretty well. Unfortunately he had to stay away from daycare for another day which meant we missed the Christmas party at Sam's daycare. But both were well enough to attend the Christmas party at Ollie's daycare the day after that. The daycare ladies cook a whole turkey for dinner and everyone else contributes sides and desserts, and it's really fun to see all the kids together and meet the other parents. Unfortunately Adrian at that point was coming down with said flu and had to leave halfway through the party. They organized a secret Santa gift exchange, and had someone dress up as Santa and come in after dinner with all the gifts in his bag. You have never seen such excited kids in your life. Ollie was thrilled to pieces, but a little nervous to actually go up to Santa and get his gift, I had to shepherd him up there. The daycare ladies are great, when they draw names for the exchange they also include suggestions as to what the child you are buying for is into, so every kid ended up with a gift they really liked. Santa really does know what you want for Christmas!

That led into our second weekend of parties, which we had to forego, because by Saturday night Adrian was recovering from the flu, but I was coming down with it. Turns out if you take loads of Gravol that doesn't really prevent you from getting sick, it maybe just delays the onset. Ade was well enough on Sunday to take Ollie to a kid's party, and I spent Sunday night with my head in a bucket. On the bright side it was better to be sick a week before Christmas rather than over Christmas, as has happened the past two years. And Sam never seemd to get the bug, also really good.

My mum was here at the beginning of December which was great. She helped clean the house (which hadn't been done since I went back to work in November) and babysat for an afternoon which permitted Ade and I to do about 5 kajillion errands, including picking up a Christmas tree. Ollie was so thrilled to help decorate the tree, putting all the ornaments on pretty much the same branch (surreptitiously redistributed by me later) . The first time he saw the tree it already had the lights on, and Ade told him to touch a branch and then turned on the lights as he touched it, so now Ollie thinks he can always turn the lights on by touching a branch. We put the tree up on a table in the corner of the room, with a gate around the table, but still the bottom foot or so of the tree became slowly devoid of ornaments as Sam removed them one by one.

The boys had a ball on Christmas morning, lots of good loot for both of them. Ollie loved his stocking and was so thrilled with all the gifts; Sam seemed to be more into the wrapping paper than anything. We tried to get them similar items so that there wouldn't be too much argument over who got to play with what, but there were arguments anyway. I guess I should get used to that. We spent the day playing and reading new books mostly, and had a nice walk in the evening to go look for good Christmas light displays.