This year was the first time we spent Christmas away from our families (other than mission years). It didn’t feel like we were isolated though. We got to spend some time with our parents and almost all our siblings on the webcam. It was fun to wake up early in the morning so we could see my mom and dad open up their Christmas/30th anniversary present. We put some money toward a big trip they’ll be taking in a couple months. We’ve had the stupid webcam for over a year, and we just now got around to setting it up. It was so much more fun than regular phone calls, so I think we’ll use it a lot more from now on.
On Christmas Eve we went with the Mascaros to the Cook’s. On Christmas Day we spent the evening at the Mascaro’s at a loud kid-filled party. The Baumanns, Sannemans and James Gardiner were there. I think playing so much with the kids is starting to force me to learn some Swiss German too. Elisa gave SO many airplane rides and horsey rides to the kids! Christmas felt good because of the quality time with friends.
We received some 2-player games for Christmas, and I love playing games with Elisa. He especially likes playing games with me when I do not get mad because I am losing. These games are not so competitive so I was all smiles, and so was Chad! We also got some new warm clothes, Swiss-German books and American condiments. If anyone is thinking of shipping any other packages to Europe, please just wait until we visit or until a friend can take the package in a suitcase. Shipping costs are just way too expensive.
We put up a recipe site to give to our Moms. It has all our family recipes that we could find. Elisa spent many a long hour typing in recipe directions. Any family and friends can use it: http://recipes.parry.org/. Chad is my little genius, I am so proud of the cool things he managed to do for our families this year.
One of the things that I really wanted to have happen while John and Renee visited is for Chad to have a good ski day with his dad. I certainly cannot keep up with Chad so he can enjoy himself and I have been pretty terrified of trying again after our trip in January.
John and Chad spent the day Skiing at the Laax ski resort and Renee and I went down to a nearby city, Chur, for lunch and sight seeing. Chur is the oldest city in Switzerland; it’s earliest inhabitants were in 3000 BC. We were really looking forward to seeing something that was reminiscent of its age but I think we may have set our expectations too high. The walking path talked about in our guide book was not clearly marked like it said and everything closed at 2 pm so it was pretty sleepy. We ended up eating lunch in a Coop restaurant (local grocery store chain) and then heading back to pick up the boys.
Meanwhile, Dad and I had powder to ski. There weren’t any lines on the whole mountain either. On a lot of the runs where the powder was really light, it was the best I’ve seen in a decade. Later in the day the light kept getting flatter and flatter. As a fog settled, we could only see a few feet. The snow stayed good. But we got to tired to ski it by the last two runs. We took it easy. It was so nice to make it back down to the car in one piece.
Oh, and I have to point out that Laax is in the Romanish speaking part of Switzerland. That’s why the apres-ski area at the bottom is called the “Crap Bar.”
We are so happy that Chad’s parent’s visit overlapped with Chad’s birthday. It is so nice to have good family and friends to celebrate. It was tricky to come up with ways to be as nice to Chad as he is to me. Elisa is talking silly–she treats me like a king. I decided I would feed him well and make him work for his present. Hopefully he enjoyed it.
My card had a clue on it. It said, “We’re perfect together.” That’s a line from the Wicked soundtrack. We have a copy of the Wicked CD, so I checked there for the next clue. It wasn’t there. I also tried the Broadway program that we still have from a trip we took 2 years ago. Then I found the second clue in the back of our wedding album where we also had written that quote. Elisa had lots of clever clues that drove me all over the apartment. One that I really liked was, “I love you so much I could cut something off.” The next clue was behind the van Gogh print in our dining room. I had to get a hint from Elisa to find it. Darn it! Later that night I read the clue to Tara, and she immediately said, “Like an ear?!” Darn it again! My mom and I must be on the same wavelength, because no one else got it.
Since Mexican food is practically non-existent here I spent the day making a Mexican feast. It was SO great to taste those flavors again–thanks to John and Renee we received a store of Mexican ingredients! We also had a great chocolate cake that I made from scratch. It turned out so good which is the good news–the bad news is I had to overhaul a recipe because we didn’t have cocoa powder among other things. I pretty much do not know how I made it. Too bad. Elisa also invited some of our friends over to celebrate my birthday. The surprise was fun.
