Christmas Day festivities

This morning began with a great memory card game that Mom and Dad gave Rachel for her birthday called "Sequence for Kids." It involves laying cards down on the floor and turning them upside down to see which ones match each other, and whoever ends up with the most matching cards wins. "Do you want to play, Mommy?" Rachel asked me. Drew was already sprawled out on the floor, ready to play, and I said, "Sure!" and I was glad I did (for once), because I discovered that my daughter has a phenomenal memory. The kid cleaned my clock even after she gave me a couple of pairs she'd won, just to make me feel better. (Uncle David said tonight that he noticed Rachel has a very strong sense of empathy even at a young age, and that it will stay with her forever; her willingness to help me with the card game demonstrated that).
Final score: Lisa 6, Drew 7, Rachel 9. She didn't even rub it in our faces that she won.

Now I know why Drew spent so much time playing all those princess card games with Rachel a year ago; he was helping her develop her memory. I thought they were just silly cards and I often wished we could throw them away because they kept ending up everywhere, but Drew knew exactly what he was doing which is why Rachel will do well on standardized tests and why Drew is clearly the better parent.

We Skyped with PopPop and MawMaw this morning and had a lovely time -- hopefully we will be able to visit them at their house sometime in 2013!

Then Drew went out to run a few errands while Rachel and I baked a yellow cake with Alice's chocolate frosting recipe. Rachel was brave enough to try to crumble the egg yolk into the bowl after asking me to crack it along the edge. She's nearing the age at which I can trust her to bake a cake mostly by herself, which is hard to believe. Both of us ended up having more cake crumbs and frosting than was strictly good for us (i.e., I kind of forgot to feed us both lunch, but we'd had a late breakfast of Grandma Jean's cinnamon rolls and bacon so I figured that would last us until Christmas dinner and Doug and Linda's). Rachel helped me decorate the cake with green and red sprinkles and sugared flowers, and then we headed to Tigard.

We really had a great time  -- for the first time, Rachel actually played with Jack and Andrew (or sat quietly watching them while they played video games and watched "Kung Fu Panda"). It was so cute to see her sitting near them with her red and black party dress billowing around her. The turkey, stuffing, potatoes, salad and dinner rolls were fantastic and everyone loved the cake -- we had only one slice left! -- and Rachel even asked, quite nicely, if she could have another piece. (I had to say no, since she'd eaten three dinner rolls and not a lot of turkey). The adults sat and talked and talked and talked and before I realized it, Drew was mouthing "Five minutes!' silently to me, I looked at the clock and it was 8:15. I absolutely hated to go; I could have stayed there another two hours (and Rachel was quite disappointed that she couldn't watch the rest of "Kung Fu Panda"), but we will see David, Anne and Jean for New Year's and I told Linda we need to get together for a playdate sometime in January or February. It would be great if we could go to an indoor playpark, like Playdate PDX, and just hang out for a few hours on a cold and rainy Saturday or Sunday.

As we left, Drew and I remarked how lucky it is that we have such a wonderful little girl who is growing up secure in the fact that she is loved by many, many people. When you get right down to it, nothing else really matters.