'tis the season

Jack has decided he needs to build a chimney for Santa to come down. Our backup plan is to have Santa come down our neighbor's chimney and walk over to our house. I think we'll probably go with that.



Today we put our tree up. We went for the smaller of the two -- count 'em -- two artificial christmas trees we own as the larger tree would take up a substantial portion of our living room and probably hit the ceiling about 4/5ths of the way up. We used the other tree last year in our 14 ft ceilinged gargantuan Kyiv apartment.

This year we're going a bit more modest.



And our Christmas-time experience is a bit different down here compared to Kyiv in other ways, too. Today we skyped with our friends from Kyiv Corinne, CeCe and Addie and they said it was too cold to go outside.

We had to make sure we put on sunscreen before hitting the pool.


Sam even got into the act, wearing a clever facsimile of what I think was termed a "swimming costume" back in the '20s.



He wasn't really so much a fan of the water, though.

Clouds chased us into the house about ten minutes before the heavens opened up.

Rainy Sunday afternoon. Perfect time for some wine and a cartoon for Jack.