The winter season is always busy at the Wasse's house from Halloween to charlottes birthday, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, our holiday party, Christmas, New Year's and then Gloria's birthday, we have a lot going on. Mercifully, we did not have to travel anywhere this year, which was fantastic. Thanksgiving was a lovely local affair with the family- Charlotte made place cards with everyone's names on them which is her new trick. Her reading skills have really taken off, and she has a lot of sight words and can sound her way through a surprising amount of words. Charlotte is taking gymnastics on Saturdays and Hebrew school on Sundays, neither of which she is terribly enthusiastic about, but we persist.
For her birthday this year Charlotte wanted a rainbow cake and a pottery painting party, so we of course delivered. Or should I say Matt delivered the cake- gorgeous as usual. Charlotte asked for an American girl doll, inspired as she is in many things by our neighbor Harper, so we obliged, not knowing the fury it would unleash in our home. Needless to say, the moment that Gloria laid eyes on that doll, it was love at first sight. She wanted to put her to bed, pat her hold her, visit her every day, and Charlotte was has been absolutely as generous as any six-year-old could possibly be, but still it creates a lot of tension in the house. This tension was not resolved when we got Gloria an imitation American girl doll from target, and trimmed her hair to look just like charlotte's. Gloria took one look at her, noticed the slightly inferior quality of her hair and said "scalp." As in I can see her scalp, don't try and fool me, people, this is no Ramona.
Gloria has taken off in terms of language development. Lots of three and four word sentences going on. The things she says most often are: sit down, me do it, eat it, have it, sit close to me, and happened? She also wants everything "biggie."
For vodkas and latkes this year I had the genius idea to hire a neighbor's home from college student to do the latke serving and bar management, which made all the difference in terms of our enjoyment of the party. Charlotte had her first sleepover at Carrie Ellis house that night, and when we picked her up in the morning we were not a little surprised to hear from Kate that she was the most generous, flexible, and accommodating child at the party. Gloria spend the night with Nanni and Poppi, much to her delight. I have never met a two-year-old who is less clingy to her parents than this girl, I'm hoping that is a good thing.We were ahead of the game because we saw the Nutcracker and got our tree Tday weekend, so we had to work a little bit extra to generate that holiday cheer. Cookie decorating entailed Charlotte and I frosting the cookies while Gloria essentially ate a bowl of sprinkles. In my eternal quest to implement family traditions, I got us an advent calendar with little drawers into which we put a piece of candy for each night, quite a hit with the Girlies. We had lots of Hanukkah fun with the family; our annual trip to Swanson's to see the reindeer and get a picture with Santa; we had the Maloney's over for Christmas eve dinner, and then the twins over for Dutch babies Christmas morning. Our attempt at Jewish Christmas was almost a total fail- we waited for two hours at the Chinese restaurant but luckily managed to have enough appetizers and soup to keep the girls happy before we had to cancel the rest of our order and run out of there. And most exciting of all, we had a white Christmas this year, the first time in 10 years! Charlotte and Harper and Gloria all got on their snow gear and were out sledding down the driveway for hours.
Matt's parents were supposed to come after Christmas, but they got bad colds and couldn't travel. So since Matt and I had already planned on taking the week off, we just did a bunch of stuff around town: Seattle Center, wild lights at the zoo, Museum of flight. We celebrated Gloria's birthday on the 31st, with bagels and lox and a puppy cake for the whole family plus Liz's in-laws were in town. Gloria has been singing happy birthday to herself ever since. When asked how old she was she replied without missing a beat, six. And for New Year's Eve, we took the girls out to dinner at Ivar's on Northlake, looking out over the water at the space needle- they loved it, although Gloria was a little more squirrely than usual. all in all, I would say we had a very lovely season, although I think some of us were a little bit glad to get back to school and work and our usual routines.
