Saturday Dec 13
I slept until almost 6, yay. I didn’t run this morning and it was just as well, it was pretty cold for here, upper 30’s. It’s funny how it can be so cold in the morning but warms up nicely every afternoon.
We called Sarah and the boys around 11 so they could see Emi open her present from them. They got her an American Girl baby doll and Emi loved it. She’s been playing with it off and on all day, loving it and abusing it by turns. Throwing baby on the floor: “o o baby fall down. Get up baby!”, putting baby to sleep, “night night baby. Baby WAKE UP! WAKE UP BABY!” We’re going to start working on waking people and babies up nicely.
We didn’t really let Emi play much with her presents yesterday but today she had a great time wearing her new dresses and playing with the trains, the scooter, and the doll. They were having another party today with a few of her friends from day care and swimming. The party theme was trains, as in “choo choo, Emi is two!”. Train paper plates, cups, stickers, table cloth, decorations. We mostly relaxed during the day, Craig and Jean picked up pizza, salad and pasta, and the cake, on their way here. I did blow up about 20 balloons and only felt a little light headed by the end.
We put some toys out in the backyard, bikes, scooter, etc.. Emi wanted to go play with them of course before the party started so we did. She practiced using her new scooter. It was the toddler version, with two wheels in the back to make balancing easier. At first she didn’t understand the concept but we kept working on it until she got it. One foot on the scooter, push with the other foot. Of course being at that particularly headstrong toddler stage she found plenty of other ways to misuse the scooter too.
She changed into her new pink princess dress for the party. One of her friends was sick and couldn’t come and the other took a long nap so they were a little late. The first family, parents and Hansl, was a friend from daycare. They were really good friends and played together really well for toddlers. Emi even shared, and didn’t declare “MINE” too much. The second family, parents and Elliot, and 7 week old Zoey (!) showed up late, just in time for pizza. They were friends from swimming. Elliot became very enamored with Emi’s new baby doll. He carried it around most of the evening and it took some serious negotiation to get him to agree to leave it here and go home to play with his OWN baby doll!
Emi had a choo choo train cake and got to experience everyone singing happy birthday again and had another chance to blow out the candles on her cake.
Now tomorrow is the first light of hanukah and time for ANOTHER party, although this time it’s just us and Craig and Jean. I better practice the blessings before tomorrow night! I have latkes to make and jelly donuts to pick up too. Busy!
Sunday Dec 14
It was a little warmer this morning. I went for a 5 mile run. It went well. When I came back I took a shower and washed my hair. Then we just hung out and played with Emi. At 12:45 I drove to Palo Alto to pick up the sufganyot, the special jelly donuts for hanukah. I got them from Izzy’s Bagels. It was pretty crazy in there, lots of people picking up special orders for the first night of hanukah.
Then I headed to Trader Joes. I needed hash browns, lox, apple sauce and sour cream for the potato latkes. TD’s was a mad house! There were so many people in there, all looking for latke ingredients and other hanukah specialties. I saw one conservatively dressed woman buying dozens of packages of frozen latkes. I guess that’s one way to do it, but they’re really not that hard to make, especially if you buy hash browns instead of grating the potatoes yourself.
Then I needed pods for their nespresso machine, but Trader Joe's doesn’t carry those, so I went across the street to Safeway. Much quieter there, and I got a coffee from Starbucks too.
Back at their house I started gathering ingredients for latkes and discovered that there was only one egg left. Oops! Then Dan couldn’t find their menorah, so he ran out to Target for both items.
I started frying the pancakes as soon as he got back. I used a mixture of flour and bread crumbs. The New York Time's recipe called for baking powder so I added that to the pancakes too.
Craig and Jean showed up. They’d never celebrated Hannukah before so I gave them a brief summary of the story behind the holiday. And I used YouTube to help me sing the blessings correctly for once.
The latkes came out great. We almost ate them all but there were a few left. Emi ate the applesauce, all the croutons from the salad, and toward the end started trying the pancakes. And she licked the powdered sugar off her donut.
These jelly donuts were not as good as the ones in Minnesota last year. They were a little tough. I’m going to try a different place this year in Minnesota so I can get Kris a vegan donut. I hope it’s good!
