Merry Christmas!
We had two Christmases as usual this year: one with Daddy's family and one with mine. It was great fun to see family we don't see very often, and the girls enjoyed admiring and, when appropriate, playing with the grandparents' Christmas decorations. The girls have lots of great new toys to play with and, so typical of the entourage's interests, practically a whole bookshelf of new books to read. Two of their favorites, How Do You Wokka Wokka? and Orange Peel's Pocket, are already being actively memorized so they can "read" them themselves.

While not technically new experiences, none of the girls remember trying the traditional holiday foods from the two households in previous years. For Christmas Eve, Daddy's family serves tamales and Mommy's family has crab soup (a twist on the traditional Irish fish or oyster stew). "New" foods were tasted and thoroughly enjoyed along with an abundance of Christmas treats. At Grandma and Granddad's house, they also helped with decorating the gingerbread cookies. Even Goose decorated quite a few; although we still need to work on not smashing the lids of sprinkle containers into the frosting on the cookie.

Christmas Secrets
This was the first year that the entourage did any Christmas shopping. I had taken the girls shopping for Daddy and the grandparents before we started travelling, and Nana even took them shopping for me once we arrived at our first stop. I was very impressed that the girls managed to keep all those gifts a secret until they were opened considering how excited they were about the purchases. When they burst through the door after shopping with Nana, Bug exclaimed, "Mommy! We bought--um. . ." Monkey finished for her, "Something we can't tell you about!"

Dogs
Each house we visited was also inhabited by three dogs: three little terrorists (wait, I mean, terriers) at the first and an australian shepherd and a couple of mid-sized mutts at the second. By the end of our first visit, the girls were finally starting to tell the dogs "No" and stand their ground (or at least keep moving) a little better. Bug even approached the dogs on her own and tried teaching them that they could lick her hands, but not her face. They fared much better with the bigger dogs at the second house, since those didn't bark as much or try to jump on them (herd them, yes, but that doesn't seem to bother the girls as much). Goose was brave enough to not only tell them no if necessary (particularly to Jojo, who seemed to regard a crumb-covered Goose as a walking snack bar), but even told me she was playing games with them when she was swinging her feet at the dogs nosing around her chair for dropped food.

Granddad's Office
Bug in particular has been interested in surgery and anesthesia lately, so one of the highlights of this trip was getting to visit the office of Granddad, a general surgeon. He has an operating room with a real operating table and the big lights and everything for in-office procedures. He showed them where everything was and how it worked and demonstrated the various positions for the operating table. He also had a Playmobil version of an operating room, which they had fun with as well.

Travelers
This trip involved a total of 20 non-consecutive hours of driving time. Overall, the entourage did beautifully. We had a few incidents of arguing/hitting/hair pulling, but once Bug got it through her head that she was allowed to physically defend herself when I couldn't adequately discipline from the driver's seat, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction seemed to kick in, and they left each other alone or at least played nicely. They watched more movies (Muppet's Christmas Carol, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Finding Nemo), listened to music, and had a blast playing with some of their new toys (little wooden family dolls, Playmobile people, and fairies were particularly popular in the car). And of course, they take full advantage of the fact that I allow additional treats for entertainment purposes when we're traveling.

(Note: Lots of pictures were taken over the holidays; however, none of them by me, which means I don't have any to post at this particular moment. Sorry!)