Happy New Year!
I’m happy to be moving out of the Holiday Season. It’s been nice to spend some extra time with Liv and the kids, but I’m ready to get back to work! I’ll put up a studio update soon. Exciting stuff is happening with computers and motors and things. I also even managed to finish a regular painting.
Holiday Recap
We had a very Covid Christmas and a Covid New Year. We had planned on going to NYC to visit Liv’s family for Christmas, and I had a $1.3k Air BnB travel credit we were originally going to use to get a place near the boy’s grandparents apartment. The credit was set to expire at the end of the year. We found a nice looking place, but the host canceled the reservation on us a week before the holiday and there wasn’t anything else suitable available, so we booked a hotel instead and used the travel credit to book a nice place for a friends get together for New Years Eve. We got a great deal on the hotel with Hotwire and we were pretty excited.
Then the boys both got Covid a few days before Christmas. I had to stay home with them on what would have been my last shopping day, and we canceled our trip to New York. We couldn’t get a cash refund for the hotel, but Hotwire was kind enough to give us “Hot Bucks” to use on our next trip.
So we had a quiet Christmas just the four of us. We opened presents and went out to the Scoot Zone (a big parking lot complex for an abandoned industrial campus near our house) so T could try out his new (to him) Kettcar and we could all stay away from other humans.
Then I got Covid too the day before we were planning to leave for New Years. Some of the friends we were splitting the Air BnB with canceled too, and through what I will blame on miscommunication and Covid Brain, I canceled and then re-booked our NYE Air BnB, but due to the intricacies of the re-booking process, we were not able to use that travel credit. We were planning on having Covid positive members of our family stay behind, so the Covid negative members could still go hang out with friends on NYE, but those friends canceled anyway and so our whole family drove down to Little Compton, RI and the four of us slept two nights in a big old house near the beach with room for three families. We called it the Ship House. It was still nice. We walked to the beach and looked at rocks and things. It was F’s first time seeing the ocean, and only T’s second or third. We only stayed two nights and left a day early, spending the NYE at home like it was any other Sunday.
What a baby on his daddy’s shoulders on a rocky Rhode Island beach might look like
In Conclusion
We ended up doing a lot less for New Years and Christmas this year than we had planned and paying a lot more than we expected. (I also just found out a travel credit I had with Delta expired yesterday . . . aargh.) I’m grateful the three of us who had covid have had pretty mild cases. I’m happy to have gotten to spend some good quality time with Liv and the boys. T has even said both nights that we’ve been back, without prompting, when we say our good-nights after story-time, that he liked staying at the Ship House. We really haven’t traveled much with these kids. Hopefully we can find a way to travel more in 2024.