Nat played in her first volleyball tournament today with her club team. It was a long day – 7am -3pm. They won 2 out of 4 sets. She said she had a fun time.

A couple weeks ago, I looked at the kids school schedule and thought they had Friday off, so David and I both took the day off from work. Then last week, I checked again and realized I was wrong, but since we just had 2 days of rain and Tahoe had 2 days of snow, we decided to let the kids skip school on Friday and we headed up to Tahoe early Friday morning. There was so much fresh snow and the ski resort was pretty much empty, which was great! This time around, both kids tried snowboarding for the first time. After the first run, they wanted to quit (falling a lot), but I begged them to keep trying and they did and ended up really liking snowboarding!

In the evening, we walked over to the lake and caught the sunset. It was so beautiful!

We also had dinner right on the lake which was really nice.

Nat got her braces on last Thursday (01/25). Her mouth has been sore/in pain since. She is limited to what she is able to eat which is really frustrating her because she loves to eat. The estimated time for her to wear her braces is 20-24 months. Hopefully it doesn’t extend beyond that.

My company commits to having volunteers at a church in Palo Alto once a month to help prepare and serve hot lunch to homeless people or anyone wanting food. Each employee gets 30 volunteer hours a year to use on volunteer work. Today was one of those days and they needed people so I signed up and brought the kids since they didn’t have school. Yesterday was the last the day of the school semester so the kids had today off. I’ve been wanting to bring the kids here for some time: 1) so they can see first hand that for some people, this meal is the first meal they’ve eaten for days and 2) so they can do some community service in general.

They washed and chopped vegetables to make a hand tossed salad

Tyler enjoyed working the window handing out the plates of food and offering salad, bread, and butter

We spent 2 hours in the kitchen and after cleaning up, I took them out to lunch and treated them to milk shakes since they did a good job. They seemed to like working in the kitchen and wouldn’t mind going back!

For Christmas, I got David, Natalie, and Tyler onesie pajamas. Tyler isn’t pictured here with his because he wasn’t feeling well when I gave it to them and he wasn’t in the mood to try his on. His isn’t an animal though, just camouflage. David and Nat seemed to like theirs!

We spent the first week of Christmas break in LA. The kids got to spend time with family from both sides. Uncle Way and family and Big Uncle were also in town for the week so the house was full! The kids like it though.

Christmas eve party

Tyler and his new cousin Olivia

Big Uncle dressed up as Santa to surprise the kids

A toast with PoPo

Kha cousins

Christmas Day with the Khas

Howlin’ Rays. A fried chicken place in Chinatown that sells Nashville style fried chicken. The line here is ridiculous. Nat really wanted to try it so Uncle Wen went to get in line for her in the morning. David and I went later to relieve him. In total, we were in line for about 3.5 hours. Was it worth it? No. The chicken is good, but max wait time I would do again is less than 1 hr.