Christmas & Monterey Bay

Another lost post I just found that I wrote shortly after Christmas 2013....

Christmas 2013
We had a lovely Christmas.  Since we were in UT last year for Christmas (we surprised our families!), this was our first year without snow.  A little weird, but when we spent Christmas Eve playing at the park, I was in heaven.

A quick synopsis:

On Christmas Eve, we had our traditional International picnic by the fireplace (a tradition from the Wade side) and each opened a present (a tradition from the Kujanpaa side, since Santa visits all the children in Finland on Christmas Eve night).

I made "riisi puuro" (Finnish rice pudding) with kiiseli (fruit sauce) for the first time!  We also had Russian piroshki, Italian meatballs, mashed potatoes, and some cheese from France.  Yum yum.  Lots of comfort food.  Abram was totally sold on the idea of eating special food on a big blanket.  :)

Christmas morning was so fun.  Abram got a little train set from Santa and kept saying, *gasp* "Oh, Santa brought this for me?  That was so nice!"  We all felt spoiled and grateful with wonderful gifts from our families.

In the afternoon, we packed up and drove to Livermore to have Christmas dinner with Ben's uncle Mike and Aunt Vickie.  More fun yummy food!  They were generous enough to let us stay there overnight, and the next day we drove to Monterey.  We debated going to the aquarium due to the expense, but decided to go.  When we were literally 20 feet outside the entrance, an older couple came up to us and gave us two extra tickets they had!  Talk about a Christmas miracle!  We all got in for free because Abram was still 2. :)

We had fun exploring Monterey and Carmel, where we did the infamous 17-mile drive.  It was beautiful with lots of different beaches and scenery to explore.  We also went to Point Lobos, where we spotted a family of whales!  Our last adventure was on the way home--Ben can now check off "visit Stanford campus" on his bucket list.  It was good to get out and walk around the beautiful campus.  Ben took some pictures on his phone...maybe he'll post them!!  *wink wink (Ben)*  I had to laugh at how disheveled we all looked after driving in the car for hours amongst other visitors who were dressed so fashionably for their visit to Stanford...especially when Abram ran around like a hooligan and an Asian grandma gave us her disapproving look...oops. :)  We also found ourselves walking behind two Russian women, so we of course tried to walk a little closer so Ben could hear their Russian, but I think we were a little too obvious...they looked back at us a couple times and then ended up stopping to admire the kids.  One of them was a little too friendly with Aila though, and when she started screaming, the Russian lady got out her altoids and tried to use them as a rattle to calm her, and when that didn't help, she gave us all a mint, haha.  Then I can't remember what we talked about, but they were nice.  Anyway.  It's always fun to run into Russians.  I think I'm about as good as Ben at spotting them now!