Scenes from a weekend #8 (and Christmas!)

I feel like I say it every year, but I can’t believe tomorrow is the last day of the year! This holiday season really seemed to fly by. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and weekend! (Or a nice couple of days off, if Christmas isn’t your scene!) 😉 Here are a few scenes from a weekend (and Christmas) in our neck of the woods!

Our Christmas Eve was lovely – we had one very excited little boy on our hands. Last year, he had no idea what was going on and while we’re not quite there with full-on Christmas mania, Roman was very aware of what all the packages under the tree meant! We gave him some Lego and I put together this awesome easel/chalkboard combo, which he’s been very busy using!

We had kind of a funny thing happen with our TV…it’s a Samsung, which apparently is known for a glitch where something burns out and it just stops turning on. So we finally got around to taking it to be repaired (not so easy when you live in NYC with no car) and Fran went to pick it up on Christmas Eve. The guy at the repair store couldn’t find it, but promised to deliver it later that day when he had time to look for it properly. Then we got a phone call – our TV was stolen from the store! They hadn’t even realized at the time – it was a couple running a scam. Good news – the store is replacing it for us. Bad news – we’ve been TV free for the week. (Which has surprisingly been not so bad). So on Christmas Eve we improvised with a video of a yule log on the laptop. 🙂 And a couple of glasses of wine!

My brother, sister-in-law and nephews came over Christmas morning for present opening – it was so awesome to have them with us! Then I made lunch (for 8 people! In a Brooklyn kitchen!) which went pretty well, I’m happy to report. (Yes, I was a little stressed prior to the day at the prospect of cooking a big roast dinner for so many!).

The next day the whole group went to the Museum of Natural History, which I hadn’t been to in years! It was so much fun. Roman slept through the first part of it, then rallied.

Just in time for the dinosaur section! He LOVED the dinosaur bones and fossils. It was so much fun watching him. Below you can see him feeling dinosaur teeth – it’s so cool how they have a lot of the interactive displays set up at exactly the right height for little ones.

When we got back, Fran’s mum Elly had arrived to visit for a night, so we all went out for pizza in the neighborhood! Check out my eldest nephew Jack – he’s 15 (!!). I remember holding him when he was a newborn and it doesn’t seem like it was 15 years ago!

We had big plans for a family day of ice skating in the newly opened ice rinks in Prospect Park. It didn’t quite work out that way. First of all, as we lined up, it occurred to me that the last time I went ice skating was twenty years ago and I was terrible at it. I still wanted to try it, though. Fran is a great skater, having grown up in Vermont, so he offered to take Roman on the ice.

I’m not going to lie, I shuffled 4 steps along the edge and totally panicked. I could see just ahead where the handrail kind of disappeared for a while and I knew I’d be going down. Despite my mother-in-law telling me not to be a chicken…I chickened out. 🙁 Fran said Roman was doing pretty well – he had traction and was pushing off a little. Then Fran looked at his face and realized he was not having a good time AT ALL.

So Fran was left on his own to skate, but he had a great time.

Meanwhile, I chased Roman around the arena and we checked out the Zambonis together (he’s OBSESSED now – he’s still every now and again announcing, “Zamboni cleans the ice!”). The photo on the right was one I accidentally took while taking off after him again – it’s actually a perfect visual of what it’s like to be in an open space with a small boy who loves to run!! 😀

Then yesterday, we met up with my family and some friends for lunch at a beer hall in Brooklyn. We got there early, figuring it’d be packed. I think the rainy weather was in our favor- as you could see we had the enormous space nearly all to ourselves!

And you know I got a few good runs in throughout the week and weekend!! 😉

How was your weekend? Did you do anything fun?

Can you ice skate? Or do you empathize with my panic??

Any plans for New Year’s Eve? (Ours are pretty unspectacular, I’m afraid!)