Happy Birthday Emi December 2025 Part II

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!

Happy Birthday Emi December 2025

Thursday Dec 11

We’ve had a pretty peaceful uneventful day. It’s been snowing almost every day in Minnesota and it’s been pretty cold too so it wasn’t hard at all to tear ourselves away. My fingers have been so raw and cracked; I’m happy to leave just to give them a chance to heal. My only regret is leaving the dogs, mostly Harper. She’ll turn 16 while we’re in California (on the 14th) and I know our days with her are limited. She’s doing great for such an old dog but it can’t last forever.

We got to the airport plenty early. We parked in the ParknFly covered parking, so no worries about snow, and there was a bus right there waiting for us. Our flight was on time and everything went smoothly except when we got to San Francisco there was a plane at our gate. We waited about 15 minutes but then our pilot got impatient and asked the airport to find us a different gate, which they finally did. Then we had to wait awhile for our bags, so Dan had to circle for awhile. Finally, we were on our way to Los Altos.

As soon as we got there we said hi to everyone and then turned right around and left again. I needed some food and we needed wrapping paper, a card, and ribbon for Emi’s birthday tomorrow. We brought presents for Christmas too but we have a few days before we need to wrap them.

We got tacos at the Super Taco Truck. I read that the veggie ones were great and they really were. I gobbled them right up.

Back at the house we spent the rest of the afternoon playing with Emi and wrapping gifts. We had Chinese takeout for dinner and Emi ate a huge amount of rice and tofu. They had plain tofu for her, but she tried some of Dan’s mapatofu and decided she liked it so we put some sauce on her plain tofu and she ate a lot of that as well.

She is really a toddler now, talking up a storm, understanding even more, and of course does not like to be thwarted. She’ll get upset but can usually be redirected. She’s a lot of fun.

Friday Dec 12

Happy birthday Emi! I managed to sleep until almost 5. It was pretty chilly but once I had my breakfast and enough coffee I went ahead and ran, even thought it was still dark. I had thrown a headlamp in my suitcase at the last minute thinking this might be a good idea, so I would be finished running and could help with Emi right away. It was in the low 40’s and I could see my breath but it was still way better than zero and having to wear kahtoolas to make it through the snow.

When I got back everyone else was just getting up. It was only  7! I jumped in the shower and was ready to start the day.

We watched Emi most of the day, but gave each other breaks and helped with other stuff as well. Dan had made the cake for Emi’s birthday the night before, but he was making the family famous butter cream frosting and I’m good at it so I volunteered to make it. We had to run out and buy a hand mixer first, however! I just know that when mixing this frosting it's best to put the icing in a smaller bowl inside a bigger bowl containing ice cubes and you can’t do that with a stand mixer. The icing came out great, although I had to work to spread it on one of the layers. It wasn’t beautiful but it was delicious!

Lee  got us bahn mi sandwiches for lunch. He tried a new place and it was fine, but the bread left a lot to be desired. Around 1 we took Emi on a walk and she fell asleep right away. We stopped for coffee on the way back and she slept until after 2.

We spent the afternoon playing. Around 5 we headed to Palo Alto for dinner at Yayoi, the Japanese Katsu place. We met Craig and Jean there. They used to have online menus that I hated but they got rid of them and I was delighted! I was finally able to figure out what to order. I got a chicken Katsu dinner that was very good.

Emi ate and ate and ate. Agadashi tofu, dumplings, noodles. We finally had to drag her away because we still needed to go back to the house, eat the cake, sing happy birthday and open presents and it was getting late. She threw a fit when we finally made her stop eating!

In the car she started asking each of us to sing happy birthday. When she got to Kelsey, she hasn’t been feeling great and she was dozing so we told Emi that mama was sleeping, and Emi started yelling at the top of her lungs, “MAMA WAKE UP!!!!!” over and over! She wouldn’t stop and got quite upset. Toddlers! They want what they want, until you can finally distract them with something else.

Back at the house we sang happy birthday, blew out the two candles, and ate some cake and vanilla ice cream. It really did taste delicious. It’s one of my very favorite cakes.

Then Emi opened her presents. She got some great stuff, a little kid scooter from Craig and Jean. a brio train set from her mom and dad, a princess dress and magic wand from us, although I think she liked her card the best because it plays happy birthday when you open it!