Months ago we had a game night with some dear friends and their family. They brought several games to play. One particular game was a bit of an eye opening experience. I can't remember what the game is called but basic idea is as follows. Everyone has a tile and marker to write their answer. Someone asks a question and you write your answer down as a % to which you agree with the statement/question then without seeing other people's answers, you put yours down in order of least to greatest. Ok that was a weird explanation. The real result that was surprising came with the questions "How important are family traditions?" My kids wrote their percentages down and put them clear at the beginning of the row. Meaning they didn't think anyone could think family traditions were less important than they felt.
Sure enough, they put 0% importance on family traditions and simply said that they didn't think we had any. Now all the adults were feeling a bit bad for me because they were even aware of all the things I try to do around holidays. I wasn't sad. Honest. I was just surprised that all the work I put into the various activities were really not all that important to them. I actually had bumped into someone's opinion instagram post that suggested doing a poll with your kiddos before major family holidays about expected fun and food that made things feel special for them. I confess that I will still do activities for the various holidays because it brings me joy. But glad to know that I really don't have any pressure from the kids to make things magical for them. So, today for example, I didn't do my usual learn about Martin Luther King Jr activities and food. We just had a good conversation about why they didn't have school and the price many had to pay to try and get kind treatment.
For Christmas, since all of my kids are non Santa believers, I went back to the idea of the kids buying gifts for their siblings doing a random draw. Mia took it a step further and purchased gifts for everyone. But the kids thought that was all Christmas was going to be. Meanwhile, I had been painting and building various Christmas characters out of all the boxes coming to our home prior to Christmas. I had an idea that stemmed from last Christmas's opening game. Last year, I wrapped each person's gifts in the same wrapping paper. Everyone had their own print but there was no names written on the gifts. Instead, they each got their own scavenger hunt to find their wrapping paper. My favorite scavenger hunt was the one I found for Fernando. He had clips of words from famous Christmas songs that lead to another clue. You could hear him singing around the house desperately trying to figure out the correct missing word.
It was also a bit of a trick because for Christmas itself we had flown to Costa Rica which had its own fun delays and sicknesses etc. We came home in time for New Years and I did my tradition of New Year's tree with activities. I love watching the kids get excited for what each other gets.
Anyway, back to Christmas 2023. After we did the kid gifts exchange, my parents came over for the day. They are currently serving a mission in Alaska and live in Wasilla which is about 45 mins away. They had a cute gift that my mom made. These cute little gnomes that she hand kitted. They looked incredible. The last gift under the tree was a simple Christmas bag with a silly poem I wrote and QR code to the Left Right story.
POEM:
Your sibling gifts were magical! it’s fun to give And get
Surprise It doesn’t have to end. I hope you didn’t fret
But of course we haven’t made it easy so listen up my sweets
Some Christmas friends helped hide your things Each one with challenge you must complete
This starts it off with all of you gathered round from young to old
Those envelops have clues you’ll need listen to the rules and story as it unfolds
The link went to One Simple Party' blog. I had everyone get in a circle Oldest to Youngest. I had gifts for my parents so I had my mom stand in for me and so I could read the story. I handed an envelop to everyone in the circle and started the story. This story had the unique direction of "all around". The all around cue meant everyone gave their envelop to the person across from them. I can't tell you how many times I drew a diagram starting with one person to find out where that envelop would end up. It looked like one of Javi's mazes he loves to do. I tried it so many times and with some many different starting positions. And I still was nervous. It went off without a hitch, but I still double checked. Now that everyone had their correct envelop, we had a clue to search for the first Christmas character.
First off was a reindeer. Ok, use some imagination and think about designing things with just cardboard boxes. Don't think about all the creative work people have done with cardboard. I felt like the inversion of the boxes to avoid needing to cover up the various amazon or Walmart logo placement was enough extra effort. The head had a game of ring toss. The winners got to open their presents first.
After the game and presents, they found a clue that took them to the garage to find a ginger bread house. The front door opened to a small box inside the big box. It was full of brown bags painted like ginger bread houses. There were random treats (including oranges) or a post it notes. Some even had $ hidden under the treat.
The game was inspired by this post on Facebook. They had numbered bags (like seen above) and numbers in a cupcake pan. I added the bonus of colored stickers and colored ping pong balls. Everyone got two tries per turn. If you got the same colored ping pong ball into a space that had a matching colored number, you got to look at the number bag you landed on and decide to keep it or randomly select another bag. It was surprisingly hard to get the balls into spaces for me, but everyone else seemed to do it rather well. After the game and presents, they were led to the guest room to find the snowman.
I felt pretty proud about the hat having a book for the rim of the hat. The top part of the hat had the game. We had to scoop "snowball" cotton balls into a container but used the scarf to make it hard to see. It was so funny to watch. I went last so I got the advantage of seeing the best way to go about it.
After this game and present opening, the clue led us to the game room. This particular character had no game to play because all the gifts were games to play together including the track. The track box had a new backboard for our indoor basketball game that had been busted by some slam dunks. We also had some board games: Oh no! Volcano, El Dorado (or Dorito as Javi calls it), Kites. There was also a diamond Christmas picture, and Mario Wonder Switch Game.
Finally behind the couch there was the candle. The flame had Pictionary Air. I custom made some cards that had various Christmasy clues. With the stylus, people took turns drawing their clues in the air while everyone else tried to guess what they were drawing. The catch is the person drawing can't see the screen. The stylus casts the light drawings onto the screen.
It was a lot work planning, making sure the correct gifts were in the correct characters, hiding the characters (ok, that was easy since I always do stuff like this for my church callings. The kids just assumed it was for activity day boys), and then having them ready Christmas morning without drawing attention to them. I loved it so much. It spread the Christmas fun for most of the day. We only had two hours to clean up and get the space ready for our Christmas Dance. This year we invited two families to join us. Mia did the food. Fernando put together the play list that builds to a climax song and even has an interpretive dance moment. I sent my parents to the USO to deliver the baked goods we made for the airman who couldn't go home for the holiday. Magically things were ready to go at the designated party time. There were treat and finger foods galore. Super impressive since Mia had 4 wisdom teeth removed a week prior.
I have been looking back over the years and regret not keeping up with our family blog. So many memories lost to me. I even read some of these posts and look at the pictures and still don't remember being apart of the memory listed. So I'll attempt it again. 10 years later. We added a kid since the last post and had another move on to college with another about to follow.
Fernando is the Bishop of the Mt Baldy Ward and has been since right before the big Covid 19 moment took as all for an interesting loop of events. It's to the point where people have asked how long he's been in and whether or not he is ready to move on. Although it isn't super great having him gone, I feel like we have been training for this moment our whole married life. Medical school did a great job at training me for flying solo.
Mia is finishing up her final year of college and in her internship phase of her business major. I always thought that art or design or sewing would be her choice of major. But in true Mia fashion, she discovered her own passion and path and is getting it done.
Tiago is finishing is final semester at the Middle College. I keep trying to convince him to take a few more courses to save himself time and money later but parents aren't known for knowing anything until there is a chance to look back and reflect. He has been accepted to University of Hawaii but is thinking of staying for a year our local University of Alaska. He is doing varsity basketball again. I am impressed with the drive he has to continue with Basketball although the team is still waiting to get a win.
Talia is working on juggling a lot of talents in music. She is the ward organist. She has taught a few kids on violin, viola, and currently piano. She made it into Swing/Varsity choir. She arranges music and has picked up playing the guitar. This year we decided to homeschool to work on prioritizing school assignments to give her a fighting chance to get into Middle College. She also is trying to learn Spanish.
Joaquin started middle school and has loved being in his English class. He also really enjoyed his mysteries in history class. He has been in orchestra but doesn't really care about playing the cello. We have hopes that he will finally make it into a season of basketball without breaking something. For the the past 3 seasons, he broke something right before practices really even began. He broke his foot once at school trying to jump and touch the rim of the basketball hoop. He broke his hand during a practice. and broke his thumb doing something else.
Javier is our only one in Elementary school. He has hearing aids that he wore diligently but then got out of the habit. He loves listening to books. His most favorite books are the I survived Series, books about animals, How to Train your Dragon series, and practically any book about history. He is always learning facts and sharing them with us. He loves his oldest sister and spending time together as a family. He has decided that Santa is not really based on logic.
Myself. I actually look at my life and wonder how I am here. How am I now 43 and have kids moving on with their lives. I have often wondered what my next steps are going to be. Either way, hopefully I will be better at up keeping this for my own viewing pleasure.
Today I gave a talk over zoom to a church branch in our Stake. Such a funny thing to do. I was asked last minute because I agreed to put my name on a list of those willing to help speak in the various alaskan branches. Years ago, I was in CA with my in laws at their branch during Fast and Testimony Sunday. I kept thinking how weird it would be to have to give and listen to the same 10+ people every week. When I came to Alaska and saw the small branches, I vowed I would always be willing to be a speaker as needed just for the people to get a break.
I was asked to give my thought about the LDS General Conference talk by Elder Cook in Oct 2020 entitled Hearts knit in righteousness and unity. I receive the text Saturday after I had finished my morning shift as a temple worker and while I was at my son's girlfriend's swim meet. I already planned to take my youngest to the swimming pool and bowling with his friend. Not wanting to refuse, I agreed and just hoped that I could come up with something. Thank heavens I had to give a lot of talks while serving as the 1st Counselor in the Stake Young Women's organization that I could find a previous talk that was about the same idea. I shifted a few words around and because it was via zoom, I could prop my phone on my laptop and read my talk and reference Elder Cook's talk pretty seamlessly. My talk ended in just enough time to take Joaquin and Talia to church for their responsibilities as the new Deacon's president and the ward organist respectively. I let Talia drive them down last week (illegally since she is still only 15 and on her provisional license). I dropped them off and came home to pick up Tiago and Javi. We made it back with a few minutes to spare.
After playing for primary and catching the rest of RS, I was a bit pooped. I made everyone scrounge around for lunch and drew some pictures with Javi. I get a bit sleepy so I curled up on the couch. I have a vague memory of Talia asking to go ice skating and her friend Robert coming in. I wasn't even alert enough to pretend to be awake when she brought him into the house.
When we knew Fernando was going to be deployed, I started figuring out how to pass the time so I didn't pass out as a mom. I knew we wanted to visit family to help the kids have some family love coming from more than just me. To achieve the multi-state travels, I planned on using our ability to fly on the military airplanes called Space-a or hops.
Quick overview:
The term Space-a is condensed for Space Available. The military has various flights for loads of stuff and whatever space they have left over is open to military members and their family. Each person/family is given a rank between 1 (totally gets on every time) to 6 (pray no one else shows up or that there are tons of seats). We were a category 4 with Fernando's deployment status. The flights are random and only published 72 hours out at a time.
We wanted to travel to California first to visit the Tovar side then head to my sister's house that happens to be a convenient 2 hours away from them. Then drive (which I soon switched to fly because I am not a long distance driver) to Utah to visit my sister Angela and her new baby. Finishing the tour would be a stay at my parents' house.
All these plans took a shuffle when I found out my sister was going to be on bed rest until she was able to safely go into labor on her own. We tried numerous ways to make it anywhere close to Utah, but no go. So, we went back to plan a. The nice thing was that weather in Alaska was still pants and long sleeve weather. I had our bags packed for weeks just ready to go whenever the flights showed up. Still no flights were going from Alaska to California.
Then one fateful Sunday, a flight to Hawaii opened up. It turns out that Hawaii has several flights a week going to various places in California. I figured, stay in Hawaii a few days. Enjoy the sunshine and the beach then take the first flight to California. So the adventure begins.
We had a less than normal first time experience getting onto space-a. Everyone who wanted to fly was able to get on board. I had brought snacks for the flight and thought "we just ate lunch and the flight is only about 5 hours, so we won't need the meal." WRONG. I didn't understand that different airplanes are flown and some are significantly slower than commercial aircrafts. The kids were starving, but luckily some nice people shared their boxed lunches that I should have ordered when we were getting our boarding passes.
What rocks and stinks about these flights is that the airplane is a free play zone. We played red light green light in the middle of the plane, got to visit the cockpit to see the pilots, lay on the floor to watch movies, and wander as we pleased. The stink is that the open ended opportunities are less appreciated than limited ones. I confess I didn't plan well. The flight seemed to drag on forever with its loud engine noises and windowless tomb like feeling.
We arrived in plenty of time for me to get our rental car except we weren't aloud to deplane for another hour and a half. At this point, all of my kids passed out. I had to wake everyone up which led to a scream fest and grumpy incapacity to help. I felt so sorry for all my tired, starving kids. By the time we got off, the rental car place on base was closed and same with all the food places. The shuttle bus wouldn't allow for suitcases, and the taxi ride to our hotel was a steep $75.
I needed a moment to think. We parked ourselves in the kid area that we would end up knowing quite well by the time we left and I worked the options. End result was to take a taxi to the airport car rental area, get a sort of over priced deal with all the airport fees and taxes, but make it to the Hale Koa in time to sleep at a ridiculous hour.
Next morning wiped out all the stresses of the day before. Nothing like an all you can eat breakfast looking out to the ocean, a chance to swim in a pool next to the ocean (I would never go into the water in Waikiki), and off to our next hotel at Bellows beach. The trick with space-a is that you never know when you are flying out so you never know how long to have your car rental and hotel space. I figured we'd stay until Wednesday and then easily catch a flight to California. I scheduled hotels and rental cars accordingly.
The kids wanted to play at the beach, spend a day at the Polynesian Cultural Center, and beach some more. Sounded perfect to me. I was amazed at my stamina. I swear I couldn't do all the activities and driving with no naps and pretty rough sleep. I felt like I was being magnified and then some. Here are some of the photos from that trips
