It was, as Shannon has already described on her blog, a grand and wonderful holiday for us. Since I've already blown my new year's resolution (to get eight hours of sleep each night), I'll only blog a little bit more. For me, the very best thing about our time up in Moorhead - apart from being with friends and family nonstop - was spending so much time with Julia or Genevieve or both. It's not news that I think Julia is hilarious and fun, but I enjoyed spending hours and hours with Gigi, too. Her personality is really emerging, so it was very nice to figure out what makes her smile (high-pitched songs, my specialty) or frown (loud, low sounds), to entertain her for extended periods of time, to engage in the once-and-again familiar process of cycling various toys through we short attention span, and to discover her first little nubby tooth. Yea, verily, a Yule I'll remember.
A few others details worth recounting:
3 - the number of wins which both my mother-in-law and I had at the end of our Scrabble tournament. The player who kept score lost each time.
1 - a) the number of walks Julia and I took with her cousin Logan, who was soon equally tired of walking and of waiting for Julia; and b) the number of times Julia played at the playground in my in-laws' neighborhood, in 40-degree weather. Other kids were skating on the ice rink; mine was going down the slide on the jungle gym.
12 - minimum number of sheets of lefse which Julia downed at one or another meal at Nonna's house.
5 - characteristics which Julia cited in repeating and answering my question (posed over dinner on New Year's Eve), "Is there anyone as wonderful and handsome as your Daddy?": "Daddy has little tiny eyes, a gweat big mouth, a red shirt, tiny little fingers, and tiny pants."
10 - the rate, in miles per hour, at which we crawled from St. Cloud to Rogers, Minnesota, thanks to the New Year's Eve snowstorm.
$74.55 - cost of one night's stay at the Super-8 in Rogers, where we waited out that snowstorm in a family event now dubbed "Julia's Blustery Day."
10:45 p.m. - the estimated time at which Julia finally fell asleep (nearly four hours after her usual bedtime and three hours after first trying to go to sleep) in our motel room. She was thisclose to making it a New Year's Rockin' Eve.
4 - number of consecutive days on which I've enjoyed (thoroughly!) a Red Bull, from 12/29/06 through 1/1/07. (Reasons for consuming them, in daily order: to be buzzing for a family portrait, to be raring to go for my in-laws' 40th-anniversary party, to be up for the long drive home [the one that ended 60 miles short, in Rogers], and to keep me up for a much-needed grocery-shopping expedition earlier tonight. The little cans of dope were a gift from my sister-in-law and her kids; I'd never before had one and but for the steep price, I may not be able to stop having them.)
6 - the number of cups of coffee I enjoyed in my fantastic new "Stewart-Colbert 2008" mug, a gift from my sister-in-law. (It's not just truthiness to say that it really is fantastic: the politics are a-okay, of course, but the mug is also big enough to hold 15 ounces of coffee and has a handle big enough for my hand, so I don't have to do the two-finger dangle mandated by most mugs.)
0 - bad gifts.
2007 - a year to which I'm greatly looking forward.