(post written by Chris, a rare thing!)
Just a few words about what we've been up to during this most wonderful time of the year. I have always loved the time from Halloween to New Years, and so far this year has been wonderful.
Halloween was great. My parents came down to join us before a planned trip to San Diego. It was so fun to have them here to see our little girls and get to spend some time with them. Samantha had Grandma at her beck and call...I don't know who was more pleased about that. Anyhoo, for Halloween we dressed up as a Wizard of Oz crew (I guess Linzi really likes me in outfits where I have to paint my face). We had fun at the trunk-or-treat at church on the 30th (lots of candy, candied apples, and fun little carnival games for the kids), as well as the YMCA Halloween extravaganza, and really enjoyed trick-or-treating on Halloween night. Madi wasn't too sure about her lion costume, but Samantha thoroughly enjoyed being Dorothy, and couldn't wait to race from house to house to ask for more candy. I think the idea of people giving out handfuls of free candy blew her mind a little.
Then we had our highly anticipated San Diego trip (one day we may decide to vacation to someplace other than San Diego and Utah, but if something's working, why change it?). Earlier in the year one of Linzi's friends had run in a Great Urban Race and it looked like a blast. It's kind of like an Amazing Race on a local level. You get 12 clues at the start of the race, and then have to decipher where each clue takes you somewhere in the city. At each location there is some type of task to perform, and you have to take pictures/videos to help document that you've completed it. Once you've finished 11 of the clues, you run back to the starting location, show them your proof from each checkpoint, and you're done. Lots of people wear crazy costumes, and part of the fun is that everyone decides on the route they're going to take between all the clues. So when we saw that there was a race in San Diego, we arranged to have a week of vacation that overlapped, convinced my parents to come down with us to enjoy the week and watch the girls during the race (sadly we couldn't convince any of our siblings to come as well) and I spent far too much time reading about other people that have run these in the past.
We rented a sweet van (Chrysler Town and Country is HIGHLY recommended by BrownTown) and survived the drive down to San Diego. We had found a little condo right on the boardwalk at Pacific Beach. It was a wonderful location, but they had gone a little too crazy on their Firefighter theme in decorating the condo (the only thing missing was the fire pole). But it worked out great...right by the pier and boardwalk, 1 minute to the beach...great spot.
We did the race our second day there. I won't bore you with the full play-by-play, but here is some of what we had to do, to give you a taste of our little jaunt through downtown San Diego. In no particular order we had to:
- play mini-Plinko at some random bar and Instagram a picture (it would have helped if I didn't have to download Instagram to my phone while we were running the race)
- Take a picture of us with a convertible
- Brink a fortune cookie back to the finish line
- Take a video of giving a complete stranger a piggy-back ride
- Find some whole-foods store and take pictures with products (animal on the label, containing coconut and chia seed, natural on the label, something with chocolate)
- Build a little tower with cassette cases and remove one of the levels without the upper levels toppling (we had to do this twice because the video didn't work to record it on the first one)
- Interlock arms, and with our other arms assemble a pizza box
- Toss 3 ping-pong balls into a basket on Linzi's head without her dropping any of them, then give our best MJ tongue-wagging pose
- Taste test 4 different (2 each) samples of flavored oil and vinegar...if we didn't guess the flavor right (which we each missed one) we had to build a tower with the sample cups
- While blindfolded, assemble a group of blocks to match a design in a picture under the direction of the other partner
- Place an uncooked spaghetti noodle in Linzi's mouth, then without using hands, string 6 rigati noodles onto the spaghetti noodle
- Eat a little larva in some hot sauce
- Visit a Yoga center, have one person stand in the tree yoga pose (without falling) while the other one wrapped a roll of toilet paper around them 12 times.
Anyhoo, we ran all over the city and had a blast doing it. We had boasted about how we were going to win the race, while in reality were just hoping to not finish last, and not pass out as we ran around the city (our workouts have been weak to non-existent recently). Much to our surprise we finished in 7th place (out of somewhere between 100-200 teams)!!! That qualifies us for the national championship race in Puerto Rico, which we unfortunately cannot participate in. It would have been so fun to visit John and Lyndsie. All in all, the race was a blast, and that for me would have made the vacation. (I'm already planning on how we're going to do it again...)
But the rest of the week was probably even better. We loved walking around SeaPort Village, visiting the Mormon Battalion visitors center, seeing the seals at La Jolla, swinging on the beach with Sam, playing at the beach (running from the waves, burying Sam in the sand...Linzi wouldn't let me bury Madi), golfing with my Dad on Coronado, visiting Belmont Park, renting cruiser bikes and riding them up and down the boardwalk, Sea World (most of the time was spent at the Sesame Street area where Sam was in heaven getting to meet Tele and Bert; however we were able to avoid the monster tantrums that we had last time we were there as a family), watching HGTV and playing games at night, visiting the beautiful San Diego Temple, and having lunch on the bluffs at La Jolla. It was a wonderful, relaxing, pretty-much perfect week. We were incredibly tempted to stay there and not come back to work. We can't wait for our next trip down there.
The rest of the November was a lot of work for me, potty training frustration at home, new foods for Madi, and then Thanksgiving. I had to work in the morning, but was able to avoid having to get called back in to the hospital for the rest of the day. With no family in town, and all of the friends that we've typically done Thanksgiving with in the past either moved away, out of town, or hosting family, we decided to just have a BrownTown Thanksgiving this year. Linzi cooked a delicious traditional Thanksgiving dinner, which we thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe one day Samantha will eat it too. Madi on the other hand is now eating anything she can get her skinny little hands on. She is never satisfied with the amount of food we give her...maybe she'll start packing on the pounds now. The rest of the weekend we got to hang out as a family, put up Christmas decorations and lights without injury (which I will consider an accomplishment after the urologic injury I just evaluated in the ER...let's just say that the proper way to get down from a ladder is not to straddle it and slide down...that can get a little messy for the guys), do a little Black Friday and Christmas shopping (craziness). It was really great. We also had my work Holiday party...they rented out a bowling alley and had free bowling, pizza, face painting chocolate fountains and a balloon animal maker. Of course the highlight of the evening was playing with balloons and dancing to Christmas music (along with the balloon Elmo that we waited probably 45 minutes for).
Then last night we decided to resurrect the Gingerbread house creation competition with the Wilsons and Emily Robertson (we wish Jay could have been with us). Is it bad that so many of our social outings have competition as a key ingredient? Maybe that's why I don't have a lot of friends. It was a blast. We learned some lessons from last time, and I think we all considered it a success that we didn't have our houses crumbling to the ground before we could decorate them. The key is in the icing glue. Anyhoo, beforehand we made graham cracker trains with the kids (Sam's goal was to eat as much sugar as possible...she would continually eat her "decorations" if I wasn't swatting her hand away from her mouth...I think she ate a few pounds of sugar last night). After sending them to bed we made our gingerbread architecture, and had a lot of fun doing it. We'll let you decide who's you like the best. And what better background entertainment than Utah thumping BYU in their basketball game.
We're excited for Linzi's family to come down to visit for Christmas and the end of the year. I'm sure the good times are going to continue! If only the other 90% of our lives was as exciting and fun as this post.
Merry Christmas everybody!
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