Unsurprisingly, we spent a fair amount of this month getting ready for Christmas, and taking cute pictures of our kids and whatnot.
I also got a chance to visit my little brother. I was $126 dollars short of United’s new thresholds (50,000 miles + $5,000) for Gold status. I wouldn’t have bothered doing anything for the sole purpose of getting gold status, but KrisDi pushed me a little bit and it wasn’t hard to convince me to visit Northwood. We drank, hung out with his friends, visited a $1.8 million dollar house listed in his neighborhood, beer shopped, and toured a porn studio. It was very nice. While I was gone, KrisDi kept the kids occupied and alive. She does it more gracefully than I do. There were no freezing picnics.
I took both kids to the dentist; generally, nothing exciting. They were good. To keep them occupied during waiting times, the hygienists provided puppets with dentures and oversized prop toothbrushes, with which the kids pretended to be dentists with frightening zeal.
The Popes and the False Alarms and I tried to take our oldest daughters out for Daddies Daughters Day. It was fun, but things didn’t work out terribly well for us. We couldn’t go to the restaurant we wanted (Cheesecake Factory) because there was a 1+ hour wait, there was still a 30 minute wait at our backup option (Red Robin), they were out of fruit punch, we couldn’t see the Bellevue Christmas parade, etc.
We had a two hour delay that I couldn’t understand. There wasn’t even snow on the road. Just slush. That was a bit of a logistics problem; KrisDi ended up taking the day off to take care of the kids.
Finally, last but not least, we took the kids up to Bellingham for “Grandma Christmas.” We gave Grandma a little stuff, she gave the kids some stuff, they built decorations together, and decorated Mom’s homemade fake Christmas tree. I think generally everyone had fun. Brothers and I are still planning to give Ma an oven, but she needs to jump through some hoops to make sure it’s OK.