The first half of this December was a bit weird. We had finished all our Christmas shopping (but actually had a lot of stuff to wrap because now Apollo has a lot of friends to buy for) and was able to avoid the malls, but we also ended up being really busy because I was away for work for a week and then when I got back everyone was sick.

My trip to the Bay area was rather boring. Travelling there is not like going to NYC at all because all the offices/hotels are in office parks and there’s absolutely nothing to do after work (i.e., can’t walk around). I had a rental car but was a bit constrained because there was nothing I wanted to tour, and I was there with a lot of coworkers so there’s some responsibility to hang out with them. On the plus side, I saw a couple of movies while flying to/from the west coast (plus the travel wasn’t too crazy as I had reasonable flight times and direct flights).

As the holidays came, we did our usual family dinners and social outings. We didn’t put up a Christmas tree this year because we didn’t have space (lots of toys everywhere) and even if we did, I think we would have another problem as there are too many presents to fit under the tree! I guess having kids causes that problem.

Opening presents took A LONG time. It was mostly Apollo’s effort to open his and Jovian’s presents and he would get distracted after opening each one. It basically took the entire day to open, clean up and put away all their new toys. Then more presents showed up after that day as we went to more Christmas events.

We didn’t go out for Boxing Day because it didn’t make sense with kids. We did some Boxing Day shopping online though. I had the week between Christmas and New Years off so we went to a couple of malls later in the week, and it wasn’t that bad in terms of people. But I didn’t end up buying anything due to Black Friday and buying online.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: bayarea, christmas, recap