I was so delighted with how many of you took the time to read my post yesterday and comment. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside….which makes me want to do it again! I guess that’s behavioral reinforcement theory in action. :)
The focus of today’s post is THE HOLIDAYS! Specifically, I’m referring to Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. In a normal year, I would have shared pictures from the holidays within a day or two of the festivities. As I mentioned in my last post though, motivation has been low and I just didn’t feel like it. Subconsciously I may also have believed it wasn’t share-worthy because these were all small, informal celebrations at home with our little family. Seemed too boring for a Facebook gallery or a blog post. But heck, why not? I’m sure at least a few of you will enjoy seeing this, if only to see how much Nia is growing.
Thanksgiving
I LOVE eating, which makes Thanksgiving one of my favorite holidays of the entire year. I can’t even tell you what a luxury turkey is here. There are some available in the stores at the holidays but they sell for about $10/lb. We get the hookup from the Delhi Embassy, who allows us to pre-order a turkey from them for the steal-of-a-deal price of $3/lb. Still quite expensive compared to the US, but we’ll take it. In fact, we got two and stashed one away for Christmas . . . because can there really be too much turkey??? I think not.
Doesn’t Nia look old in this picture? She’s trying to grow her hair out but there’s this perpetual snarl (we’ve named it Snarly as in “How is Snarly today?”) that forms on the back right side that drives me crazy. She likes to just comb the top layer and ignore it. One day she said I could cut the snarl off, which I’m not sure she’d actually like the results of. I’m letting it go until school starts in person again but then she’s got to comb her hair thoroughly each day or it’s getting chopped!
Christmas
Christmas ended up being quite nice. I think I associate hunkering down with Christmas so staying inside and watching movies and playing games felt Minnesota-esque in some ways. I just pretended there was snowstorm outside instead of a 90 degree day. ;) As you can see, we not only had our second turkey, but we replicated our entire Thanksgiving day feast. I strongly dislike cooking so Nick has become our cook out of necessity these last few months. I do all the menu planning, food ordering/shopping and dishes and he makes the food magic. He’s gotten quite incredible honestly. For Thanksgiving and Christmas he did EVERYTHING from scratch because pre-made luxuries like bread crumbs and pie crusts don’t exist here. And while it produced a RIDICULOUS amount of dishes that made me miserable, the delicious food washed away all those bad feelings in an instant. I got at least 8 “Thanksgiving meals” out of what we made for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which should hopefully hold me over ’til next year.
Nia and I got ‘fancied up’ for Christmas. Nia insisted on wearing her favorite Indian outfit. And I shocked everyone by putting on makeup for the 5th time in 2020. BIG DAY! As I eluded to earlier, Nia is shooting up like a rocket. She’s 4’4″ now. This dress, which touched the floor in 2018 when we got here, is now is a wee bit too short. That dress doesn’t have many wears left before it goes to a new lucky little girl.
Christmas always requires being on top of things. During the normal part of the year, mail takes about 2 weeks to get to us. At Christmas, that jumps to about 4-5 weeks because the Diplomatic postal service can’t get the increased volume onto planes (which is how it gets to us). I use the rule of thumb that anything I want guaranteed to arrive by Christmas needs to be ordered by November 10th. The upside though is that all my Nia shopping is done by mid-November. We were totally spoiled this year. Nick got free diving and scuba stuff, I got loads of new games and puzzles (favorite = The Isle of Cats).
And Ms. Nia received all sorts of goodies like American Girl Doll stuff, Pokemon cards, books galore and an Audible subscription (my girl is OBSESSED with audio books). Here she is opening Santa gifts:
And here she is reading her new Goddess Book between skype sessions with the grandparents!
And this one was too sweet not to include. Here is Nia watching a movie with her American Girl dolls, who are also dressed in their Christmas best.
New Year’s Eve
The bulk of our New Year’s Eve fun was from 4-6 PM. We did a family happy hour on our balcony and played our favorite Roll and Write Game DIZZLE. No one felt like cooking (and creating more dishes!!) so we ordered pizza from our neighborhood place, Pizza Express, and enjoyed it on the balcony. Thankfully the pollution wasn’t terrible that day so we were able to sit outside for a few hours without getting a headache. I’m glad we did too because on the 1st we began a really bad air quality period where we couldn’t go outside for several days. Nia wants me to make sure you notice how sparkly clean the balcony is (that’s one of her weekly jobs). :) And no, not a one of us made it until midnight (although Nia gave it a valiant attempt). Thus concludes the Novak Holiday Wrap-Up. Thanks for reading!
