A New Year is Here

Charlie and I have taken the past two weeks off from work with grandiose plans to *vacation* in our hometown.

Since we live in San Diego ... one of the top destination locations for the entire country ... there is more to see and do within a 30-minute drive from our house than is humanly possible to squeeze in on the occasional weekend. We've got the World Famous Zoo and Wild Animal Park, SeaWorld, Legoland, Balboa Park, beautiful beaches, Disney Land a two-hour drive north and mountains with snow an hour drive east.

Our goal was to hit some - if not all of these hot spots. So with two weeks off from work, we accomplished a lot on our *vacation*. Here's a quick summary...

We cleaned out our entire garage from top to bottom and mopped the floor to make room for our new playroom, which we realized is never going to work because where are all the strollers and bikes going to go?

We went to the World Famous Zoo.

We organized all of our Christmas decorations in brand new boxes - with our new label maker - and stacked them in our two-foot crawl space above the hallway with nails jutting out of the ceiling that Charlie was certain he was going to impale himself on attic.

We re-arranged every single piece of furniture in the entire house. Three times.

We rode on the Balboa Park carousel four times and the miniature train twice.

We bought several pieces of new furniture to help us better organize our absolutely crazy small cozy living space.

We re-arranged every single piece of furniture in the entire house, including our new furniture. Twice.

We generated more piles of crap than I know what to do with ... and have been tempted to drag everything that I cannot find a home for, out to our front yard and light on fire. Normally, clutter really annoys me. But, I am convinced that "nesting" is a real phenomenon for pregnant women and as such, I am going completely out of my mind trying to organize our house and not having the room to put stuff we need.

We drove to SeaWorld and waited in line to park for 30 minutes, before we considered that we are members and can go any time we want - like say, next Wednesday when nobody will be there, before banking a u-turn and going back to the Zoo.

We found bunny during our cleaning mission (hallelujah!!), and was surprised to see that Elizabeth now insists on having both old bunny ... and new bunny, tethered to her wherever she goes.

We went to sleep before midnight and watched some great movies over our mounds of clutter including Little Miss Sunshine; Akeelah and the Bee, and Bee Season. Not sure why we are so intrigued by spelling bee movies...

We introduced the kids to chocolate fondue ... a New Year's Eve tradition Charlie and I have had since we've been married.

We said that we need to move in to a larger house at least 500 times and maybe we should move out of southern California where a monster sized house doesn't cost a monster sized fortune.

We spent New Year's Day at the beach watching surfers, running from waves and building sand castles, and re-considered our position on living in southern California.

We made the resolution that we will give ourselves 6-months to figure out our living arrangement. So just about the time I am 9-months pregnant ... we will either be moving or adding on to our house. On second thought, we might need to make this decision sooner.

All told, it was a great vacation - even though we didn't do all the fun stuff we set out to do, we accomplished a lot. Charlie returns to work tomorrow, but I'm off until the middle of next week. With my remaining time off, I'm going to pick up a few extra boxes and identify them "crap that I really need but don't know where to put" with my new label maker. It would be an awful sight to see a pregnant woman in the height of her nesting craze, with two-year old triplets running around, get hauled off to jail because she is illegally burning stuff on her front lawn.