Year: 2009

Christmas eve after mass, the tree is full of presents.

We did let her open one that had some nice books. Grandma read her one and then she was tired enough to go to bed without too much protest.

Finally Christmas morning. Oh, the joy of unwrapping presents. Especially since we made her eat breakfast first.

A gingerbread man in the stocking!

Andy gets a present too.

Grandpa Jim tries to get some present-opening tips from Leilani, but he still wasn’t very good at it. Leilani had to help him more than once.

Sonja gets some help too.

So many little presents…

Stamps!!!

Grandma and Grandpa’s tree with several generations of ornaments, but no more presents. Actually, there were some left for David who would arrive later.

The advent calendar was one of Leilani’s favorite things in December, probably because there was a little chocolate each day. She likes chocolate so much that on some days, she tried to ask for another. It was great for teaching her numbers. I think she found every one by herself after we’d show her the digits elsewhere. We brought it to Austin for the 24th, and Leilani wanted to open another chocolate on the 25th. We told her that’s not how it worked, but she insisted on looking in all the little windows again—and she found one! That was her Christmas Miracle.

Among the toys at Grandma’s house are David and Andy’s collection of Smurfs from when they lived in France (where they are called Schtroumpfs). Leilani really enjoyed setting them up on the fireplace. She did leave two in the box though, the hunter and the soldier and declared the box the prison …

yelled Leilani just 2 hours ago. She was looking at her Dino book. She has memorized a few books that we read often, so I would not believe she truly reads in these, but the Dino book we had not read in at least 3 months. (And it’s German, I know Andy did not either :)

Interested I asked for her to read to me. She pointed to 2 words and read “Eine Erdbeere” – a strawberry. The words were “Ein Erdbeben” – an earthquake. There was nothing in the picture that resembles a strawberry even remotely, and I was pretty awed, even though a few letters were obviously guessed.

She had been doing fairly well with letters – Saturday we went on a short hike, and she traced with her finger all letters of the sign at the park “Alum Rock County Park” and read all correctly except for the K but so far could never combine the letters to make words.

We had a great trip to Austin again this year, Leilani really like visiting Grandma and Grandpa, and it was relaxing for us parents.

This year we arrived on the 23rd of December, just in time for the last evening of Austin’s Trail of Lights. It’s a 1.5 mile-long display at the city park, all decorated with various scenes and lot of lights—over a million they said in true Texas style. It was very pretty, and given the entrance alone, almost believable.

The scenes were mostly cartoon and Disney characters, not always painted very well. Others were more creative, but except for Rudolph and a manger scene, not all that Christmas-y. Here are some of the better ones:

Above is Mother Goose, the cow jumping over the moon, the dish, and the spoon, done in the style of a book that Leilani actually has. The Texas armadillos below were almost cute (ask Jim if armadillos in your garden are really cute), but the prettiest by far were the trees.

Where the Wild Things Are, originally by Maurice Sendak: