Thanksgiving is over and we are finally home again. And now we are stuck in the snow. Well, let's start at the beginning. Tuesday before Thanksgiving we flew to San Jose to be with Jason's family. Tuesday was a good travel day, because most people were not traveling yet. Amelia was still sick; she had been running a temp for several days, due to the fact that she was growing four molars at once. Now she has four incisors and four molars. This worked to our advantage, because I gave her painmedication before the flight, which helped her sleep the 2 hours to San Jose.
We had glorious weather in California. It was in the 60th and on Friday even reached the 70th. It was so nice to be out of the rain and cold. Thanksgiving was great. Marlene prepared a delicious turkey and all the trimmings. Everyone was able to come with the exception of Tom, Nathan and Mathews father, who was sick. Even Tony, Jason's grandfather was there. We did the second annual "Turkey Gobble off", in which everyone get's to gobble and portray a turkey. At the end a panel get's to judge the best performance. Katie and Sam took the prize this year. After everything was eaten and cleaned up, we played poker. We started with two tables and later consolidated. It was between Nate, Sam and me. Sam won big time and won all the money, well, ther is always next time.
Friday, our family and Pam with Katie and Sam went over the mountains to Santa Cruz. We went to the beach and the kids got to built sand castles. We stuck our feet into the water and got pretty wet after all. The girls had a great time playing in the sand.
Saturday we had planned to fly home (to beat the rush again), but that did not quite work out. We were at the airport at 3pm for our 5pm flight. Upon landing the airplane had popped a tire. They told us, it would only be a few minutes, while they changed the tire. It turned out that they did not had the right size in San Jose and needed to get on from San Francisco. So now our departure was scheduled for 8pm. But at that time still nothing had happened. The lady who had given us some food coupons had joked, that they needed to get us out that night, because there were no seats available until Tuesday. At 8pm they told us, that they were still waiting for the tire and now the flight crew needed to be replaced, because they reached their time limit. A crew should arrive from Seattle about 11pm, which would give us a departure of about midnight. At this point I decided I was not going to sit with the girls at the airport for an other 4 hours on the maybe promise that they would fly us out. Jason stayed and I rescheduled for the rest of us to fly home on Tuesday morning. Jason made it finally home at 3 am. We had 2 more days in California were unfortunately the weather was not as nice anymore as it had been. Amelia got sick on Monday with a stomach flu (I got it on Thursday - and it was bad).
On Tuesday by noon we were finally in Seattle just in time for the big snow and ice storm. There was no school from Tuesday to Thursday and most people did not get to work, because temperatures in the teens and low 20th kept the roads frozen with sheets of ice. Marlene had fun playing in the yard; she and Jason built a ramp and sledded down. Amelia had nothing to do with the snow. She did not even want her feet on the ground. The only way she was outside, was on someone's arms.
Only one more week before we head for Germany again. I can not believe this is the second time this year. While I try to get everything ready, we as well transformed the house from Halloween/fall to Christmas. We want to give the girls a notion that Christmas is not only something to be celebrated at any of the grandparents houses. We put hour tree up last Saturday. The ornaments are pooling on the upper part this year, because Amelia is very interested in them. She loves the lights and has figured out how to plug them in. Oh the joy of so much help! Marlene is more focused on the Adventcalender business and keeps reminding everyone to open the doors. "Chocolate" is finally a word in Amelia's vocabulary (with her parentage, it's about time). I am pretty happy that it is not so cold anymore; it really cuts back on the time we need in the morning to bundle everyone up and get going. We have, as well, made some cookies, which Marlene is pretty good at by now. My biggest struggle is to teach Amelia to cut the cookies next to each other and not make a random puzzle of cut pieces by going over them time and again. We even managed to visit the reindeer at Swansons (a local nursery) and see the lights downtown. My favorite was the Nikolaus-Feier at the German langugage school, where all the classes performed little skids and in between everyone sang Christmas songs.
So far for today. I don't know if we are going to have an other blog before Christmas. In any case I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
