New Year!

It is still january, so i think i can post about new year! :)


Last year on new year eve, ashu wanted to stay up late and i let him. He waited and waited and when it was 12 and when we wished him Happy New Year, he said That's it and was disappointed and went to sleep. He was way too sleepy to have any excitement at all.

It reminded me of an episode of Arthur. This year, AJ decided to join the fun too and we were watching t.v. and at 11, they were showing new york and the ball dropping at the timesquare and the excitement caught on the kids as me and Balaje were doing the count down too..And then when they showed nashville at 12, they both were jumping with excitement and AJ ran up the stairs and stood midway and he said mommy it is 2011 so i climbed 11 stairs. This made ashu crack up! :) This time they were pretty excited about new year since they were both up :)


With new year, they went to school for a week and the schools were closed for 4 days the next week. They had a break after the break..Lucky kids..now, why would the offices not do that too? It snowed quite a bit and the snow stayed up for the whole week..It has never happened before..The temparature usually rises in a day or two. Anyways, instead of sulking, we built a snow baby. B was not in town. If we had one more pair of hands, we would've built a snow man! :) Kids had a blast outside and they wanted to do it every day, but i was not ready to let them do it everyday and fall sick. So,i got boxes of snow inside and they were playing with it, using cups and pans as moulds. They had this colours kit that their athai had sent a while back and they added colour to the snow and were mixing colours and experimenting. It was a fun activity for them and i could work form home peacefully :)


After the break, when they had school the next week AJ asked, "Are they not cancelling school today?" My kinda boy!! :)

Break is never enough!! :)

Phew!

December was hectic. Had to wrap up so much before the xmas shut down. Was not well the week before the break and that made me even more desparate for the break :) The break was good. We drove to florida..Went all the way till Key West. It was beautiful..and we didn't do a whole lot. We decided to take it easy and do things at our own pace. Everyday we got up only around 9.30 and it was really refreshing :) Only thing is we couldn't go on any of the boat rides as it was too windy and they cancelled them all.


As usual, we left without any plan or any hotel reservation and we reserved on the go and found a resort in keylargo. Most hotels/ resorts were booked and this was one of the few decent resorts that came up in hotels.com. Resort was okay, but the room was really small. I was little bummed about that..but then we hardly stayed in the room..so no one other than me cared about it.


We stayed at keylargo and drove to Key west next two days. The drive was beautiful. We took so many scenic breaks. Beeeeautiful drive and even Keywest was so beautiful. If Chennai was maintained well - atleast the besant nagar tiruvanmyur area, it would look like keywest. Sigh! We spent some time in the resort too before we left. They loved it as there were lot of hammocks :) They also loved throwing stones into the water!! Boys! It was in 70s and very nice. We even had icecream in December. There was one flavor called mamey and the picture of mamey they had looked like mangustan and tasted awesome. but, when i searched in google it says mamey is sapota. i dont think it tasted like sapota though. We got a carribean fruit cake there and they had used rum so it tasted like it was made out of benadryl..so that went to the dump straight.
We also got cuban plantain chips. Awesome again. So spicy and yum. We got lime and chilli wheat puffs. Loved that too. I ate so much of it..it's all sitting in the waist now :-( The kids didnt like it..but we both loved it.

On our way back, we went to Miami and spent a day there. We went to the south beach and kids had a blast. It was a little chilly, so we asked them to not goto the water..but they still managed to get all wet!! The beach had a nice play area for the kids as well. If we had not had plans to goto Orlando, they would've refused to leave that place. We left in the evening and reached orlando that night and going to Orlando during xmas break is a BAD BAD idea. It was toooooo crowded. Like Pondy bazaar and ranganathan street during Diwali time. We went to islands of adventure and universal studios (took park hopper) and felt so lost inside. Horrible!!!  We went to Jurassic park ride and then to Seuss world and then decided to goto universal. We saw Shrek again and this time AJ finally enjoyed it and didnt remove his 3 D glasses :) Then we went to terminator 3D and it was okay and we wanted to goto MIB, but we stopped for the Macy's parade and it was time to go back IoA as we had taken the return ticket for Wizardly world of Harry Potter, one thing that Ashu was desparte to see :) We skipped MIB and  went back IoA and there was a lon.....g queue in front of the WWHP. There was no meaning to the return ticket. no one was checking anything and it took some time to enter the Harry potter world..after that there was a longer queue inside to goto the castle and the ride. We made a mistake and got into that queue and midway aj asked us to carry him. I really felt that if i had stood in the line at Tirupati, i would have got some punyam atleast. 1 hour in the line, i started hating it already..but being a parent isnt that easy right? Didnt want to feel guilty and continued and somewhere close to 2 hours we finally made it to the castle. It was pretty..they had the talking pictures just like the movie. Fascinating. There wasn't a whole lot, but whatever they had was good. They even had HP, Hermione and Ron show up on the balcony (Laser, i believe) and while i was waiting at the child swap room with aj who was pretty upset because they said he cant go on that ride as he didnt meet the height requirement, B and Ashu went on the ride and B said it was awesome. Ashu looked quite scared when he came out. I had the option of leaving aj with B and going alone on the ride, without having to wait in the line, but i freaked out at the thought of going alone and left. I think i should've gone..too late to think of it now!! Will i ever go back to IoA? I doubt that. AJ was crying so much since he couldn't go there..so we took him back to Seuss world and he was so happy when he went on the Red fish blue fish ride and the cat in the hat ride. It was also funny that he didnt get scared at the jurassic park ride. I screamed bloody murder at the drop and ashu was scared too. He didnt admit it, but when i saw the picture they took just before the drop, he was clenching his teeth and the expression on his face was priceless..AJ was sitting quiet as he had no clue what to expect and i think before he realized we were down anyways..Or maybe he is okay with those kind of rides! We will find out when he is little older.

We decided never ever to go back to orlando during holiday time. We saw the mad rush and cancelled our plans to goto Magic kingdom and returned home. Ashu's friend who also went during that time said that they couldn't even get tickets as it was full!!

Overall the trip was good and relaxing..didnt have the heart to come back home to the 30s.. It was in 70s in keywest, you see :)