Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I can't believe it's only January 3rd. The past few days have been a whirlwind. To begin with, I cooked a TON of food... again. Yep, after the giant Thanksgiving dinner complete with the everlasting turkey, I promised to myself that the New Year's застолье would be a very modest one - just some cheese and olives and a store-bought dessert. Oh, and maybe just a tiny bit of the Olivier salad. Oh, and Chris wanted red caviar, so of course a tiny jar of that. Plus, to add a bit of color, a small bowl of the beet salad.

Yeah, right! Somehow I ended up with two giant bowls of salads - one with Olivier and the other one - with the beet one. And I baked brie in puff pastry with the secret-recipe cranberry sauce and almonds. Oh, and not to forget, a giant cast iron pot of жаркое. So it was a whole lot of food after all. The good part is I haven't had to cook for the past few days. Which is just as well because we were busy looking for and buying a car.

So now we have a new certified pre-owned car. Hooray to us! Our old car which we bought genuinely new back in 2002 (when we were young and naive) has seen better days, much better days. We haven't been taking it on highways or anywhere outside of the 30 mile radius from our house for about a year. We'll be sad to see it go (when and if we sell it) 'cause it's been a great car to us even though pretty much everyone we know told us from Day 1 that it was total crap and we made like the biggest mistake of our lives.

Nor was buying our first car as much of a pain and a time-suck as buying this one. Seriously! I hate the entire process now and hope to not have to go through it again for the next 10-12 years. And by then we'll have bullet trains and moving sidewalks installed everywhere anyway.

Ah, I forgot to mention the gifts our very lucky son got for the New Year! A very indulgent Ded Moroz, the Russian Santa, got him this awesome thing. Needless to say, M is in love! He spent what seemed like the entire New Year's Day alternating between driving Sphero around the house and driving us up the wall complaining that Sphero wasn't charging fast enough. For now M uses Sphero mostly for flipping virtual cupcakes to Sharky the Beaver in the augmented reality game (at the end of each round Sharky says "sugar coma" which apparently M finds super funny; he also pointed out that Sharky must have lots of cavities).

M also got more lose Legos, something he really wanted for his ambitious construction projects. But at this point nothing could compete with Sphero.

Finally, this week we are back to homeschooling. Seems like our winter break lasted forever! But more on that later. For now, Happy New Year to All and to All a Good Night!