Hanukkah 2005 – Day 1 and 2 Recap
So a bit of administratia first, those of you who know me can skip over the next paragraph.
This blog will be a mix of stories about my kids, travels, technical articles, and other rantings, in no particular order. Right now it’s Hanukkah, so I’m going to post about that. most times you’ll have to bear through parent-like dotting over my kids. If you find that sappy, you might want to just skip over those parts. Other people reading this blog will appreciate it.
So here’s Hanukkah at the Humphries-Dolnick household. On Monday, we had everyone from Marla’s family over for our annual Hanukkah party. It’s also the annual sisters-get-together-and-exchange-gifts. The two parties are not always the same – sometimes the Hanukkah party cycles to Marla’s parents or (Hanukkah-observing) sister. The annual gift party is related to the holiday season, but since one sister doesn’t formally celebrate Hanukkah, they’re not always the same. This year it was.
So we ended up with six kids and eight adults in the house. Eeyore was at a friends house. Marla made fairly quick work of the Latkes earlier in the day with the spiffy new food processor I bought her. She’s quite happy with it, she used to hand grate potatos, onions, and carrots for the Latkes and now it takes half an hour with the food processor for enough latkes for all 14 people.
There was the usual family festivities, dinner, candle lighting, and then the present opening started. This is always quite an event. In theory, each child opening two or three select presents that evening shouldn’t seem like a big deal. But remember that we have six kids in the house. We have signs on the wall with each childs name, and a pile of presents underneath the signs. (Don’t forget, besides the "two or three" designated presents they get to open, each sister rbings over a pile of presents for each kid too).
So my job is to have the kids line up on the floor in front of me and wait while I pull gifts off their piles and hand them to them. Sounds simple enough, eh? Things degrade quickly as parents can’t keep up with the presents, and the kids want to actually *open* the boxes that they’ve just unwrapped. To keep them from doing this, I hand them more presents, faster, to divert their attention away from the actual contents of the presents themselves, lest they think about opening the boxes and then there would be a huge disaster.
Well, I’ve gone about as far as I can go with this entry. On to day 3.