here i am! hoo boy.  mix three small kids, christmas, holiday travel to visit family, internet connection acting up (fixed now- apparently you can’t use a wireless router for six years and expect it to keep working!) and what do you get?  a month without tsai family updates!  crazily enough, i STILL feel out of breath and trying to catch up.  our christmas tree is still languishing in our living room.  completely dried up but there it stands staring at me, judging me.  i did manage to take the ornaments off two days ago though.  but those are now hanging out in the hallway. so where to pick up?  how…

after a jam-packed saturday filled with three different Christmas parties, it was nice to just hang out at home and enjoy some family time last night.  we busted out the costco gingerbread house, much to the kids’ delight.   ooh, candy!   we decided to toss the instructions on how to design the house and just let the kids decorate it any which way they wanted.  i think they had more fun that way.     nobody seemed to heed my strict instructions not to eat the candy until after the house was decorated.   this little one was the worst offender.     and the big one was certainly…

our internet connection inexplicably died the last three days.  i was going through major withdrawals over here and feeling helplessly cut off from the rest of the world, especially xangaland!    but the upside is that i taught myself how to knit with the extra time on my hands.  random and quite grandma-like, i know, but still fun nonetheless.  my thought in that was that i wanted to knit christmas stockings for my family.  so that in the future, each of our kids could take their stocking as well as their box of christmas ornaments (they each pick one out a year, a little tradition that phil and i started…

is it just me or are these days flying by with breath-taking speed?  i’m finding it a bit tougher these days to find time to xanga while keeping on top of my little ones.  but anyhow, i’m trying!  so before i get to the christmas pics, here’s a recap of our thanksgiving.  it was just our family together this year, but was still enough to make me happy. we decided to pass on the humongo turkey and opted for prime rib instead!  i figure once the kids are older and actually want a turkey on thanksgiving, i’ll happily oblige.  but until then, we’ll celebrate our thankfulness with our favorite foods!…

you know, if you look at the word “umbrella” long enough, it starts to look really strange.  ok, i digress. we got a pretty good rain shower last wednesday morning, by southern california standards.  my kids love the rain.  maybe it’s because that’s the only time i’ll let them play with their umbrellas.  we gotta have some rules around here, right?  in any case, they get super excited when they see gray skies and rain falling and immediately ask if they can go play outside.  you can call ’em weird for that, i know i do.  but what’s childhood without these small joys?             helping…