The Days After Christmas

    After Christmas things really settled down and sort of became boring. On the 26 my cousins Danny and Maggie came over to go shopping at the mall with my sisters. Now you better understand why I wouldn't want to go to the mall with them. 1. They're all girls and will be at girls stores the whole time. 2. They could stay there for 7 hours and still feel an urge to keep shopping. 3. What person in their right mind would want to spend their vacation shopping with them!

    Unfortunately staying home wasn't much better. I thought I'd just relax and take it easy for a day. Instead my dad comes and asks me to help him and my uncle with some wood. I agree to what i thought was a quick and easy project since I had nothing better to do. I put on a hoodie, a big jacket, and my gloves before heading out to the freezing garage. Little did I know that this would become a three day project. For 6 hours straight I hauled endless amounts of extremely heavy 15 foot long planks of precious wood that my Grandpa had collected for more than 20 years from the garage to the yard. In the yard my uncle Dan was there labeling them, and every ten seconds exclaiming "Oh my God! No way! it's the Brazilian Rosewood that's amazing!" To me it was all just wood, there was the dark brown one, the light brown one, the reddish brown one, and the yellowish brown one. No difference.

    After 3 hours we had moved all the boards to the yard. My feet were numb and I couldn't feel my hands except where sharp splinters had embedded themselves in my skin. I offered to make hot chocolate just so I could sneak inside and warm up. I felt like some starving kid from Somalia, so I searched my grandparents pantry and found a Hershey's raspberry dark chocolate bar and boy did I devour that thing. One second it was in the pantry, the next it was in my stomach. Nothing in my life has ever tasted so delicious. I purposefully took a good thirty minutes to make the hot chocolate, that ironically on the box claims only takes 1 minute to make.

I went outside to give them their hot chocolate, and then I realized that we weren't done yet, we were just beginning. Next we measured the length, height, and width of each and every board that he had taken out and wrote it down in Excel. After that we still weren't done. Next we had to put all of the boards we had taken out, back in the garage. And you still haven't heard the worst part yet. That ludicrous went on for THREE DAYS STRAIGHT!

    That night my dad took me do go see Sherlock Holmes for helping with the wood. The movie was good and very interesting, but the first was still better. The next two days went pretty much the same. I work for hours with the wood, my sisters do absolutely nothing, and we go to the mall at night to get stuff that we couldn't find in Panama. Though I didn't get much out of it, it felt good helping with the wood, and it made me very proud when the adults thanked me. The biggest surprise was on the third day I found out that those old boards of wood were worth more than 12 thousand dollars! I can't wait to go skiing tomorrow and finally get a break.

Day 3

    This morning we woke up at 4 am and set out in a rental car for Rochester New York. There was virtually no one on the road the whole time since we had beaten all the traffic. After about 3 hours of driving we stopped at a Perkins to have some breakfast. After that short stop we continued on the road until we finally arrived at our grandparents house around 12pm. They were excited to see us and greeted us with lots of hugs and kisses. Slowly, one by one, relatives started to trickle in for our Christmas eve dinner.

    My grandparents have an amazing house in the woods of New York. Its oak wood and stone walls, soft carpet, and fire place in the living room leave it with the perfect Christmas setting. The woods behind the house are full of bare trees with the occasional ever green. My grandparents own half of the forest, including the pond that is usually frozen over by this time of the year. This winter is different, when we got to their house there was no snow on the ground, the pond was still completely liquid, and it was around 40 degrees outside. It still hasn't snowed yet and we  are beginning to worry that it may cancel our skiing plans.

    We had a huge meal of steak, potato salad, and much more. At the end of the dinner grandma brought out the rice pudding. The rice pudding is a Swedish tradition that we have done for as long as I can remember. Grandma makes rice pudding and drops an almond into one of the dishes, the person who gets the one with the almond puts baby Jesus in the cradle and gets good luck for the next year.

    When dinner was over we all went to the living room to open gifts. My older cousin Kevin and I made a fire in the fire place. When everyone settled down we all started giving gifts to each other, we saved the gifts from our family for the next morning.  Got my grandparents gave me $100 and my aunt and uncle also gave me money. I can't wait until tomorrow, I could really use some snow.

Day 2 of Vacation

    Ok I've gone a while without writing, but right now my sisters have forced my family to watch this romantic movie (It's like the 100th this week) I think it's called Midnight in Paris. So hopefully I'll have enough time to recall all the days up until now.
    So on day 2 of our vacation my little cousin Joey who's 7 woke me up at around 6:00am, after I had fallen asleep around one, and asked me to play Nerf swords with him. Instead I began talking to him, falling half asleep when he was talking, and then just ask some dumb question to keep him talking. After about 30 minutes I finally got up and went down stairs to play Nerf swords. I'll tell you, I never have as much fun as when I'm with my cousins. All of them are younger than me but that's what makes it fun. After slashing and hitting each other for a good hour with Nerf swords and watching some kid show about dog detectives, all my other cousins finally arrived. The oldest one is Ellie, she's about my age, then comes Ian he's almost Carolina's age, then comes Sophia who is 9, and finally the youngest cousin Kiko who is a little younger than Joey. They all live a street away from Joey so they just walked over. We played outside for hours clad in heavy coats hats and pants.
    Around 10 we decided to go ice skating at the park since the rest of the kids were still in school. The rink was practically empty except for a few younger kids. Most of my cousins didn't know how to skate so we taught them for the first half hour and then had fun for the next. We played tag until the ice patrol caught us and warned us that they would kick us out if they caught us again. We spent the rest of the day playing football and soccer. Tomorrow I will be leaving on a eight hour car trip to New York.

Surprise

    Winter vacations just began and my family wasted no time to start vacationing. My sister's birthday was this Saturday and we decided to celebrate it in a special way. Cristina had always wanted a surprise birthday party, but the problem was that she had always planned her birthday like two months ahead. So this year we let her plan her own party, but on her birthday day we left and told her that we were going to dinner. Cristina, you can say is a very clueless child. Had it been anyone else in the family, they probably would have noticed that the dog had been gone all day, half of her clothes were missing, or even that we kept walking behind her with bags and boogie boards. Even when we drove for two hours and turned into Coronado, she didn't suspect anything at all. We had her convinced all the way until she was inside the hotel room. 
   We stayed at the Coronado Golf and Beach Resort. The suite we were staying in was probably one of the nicest hotel rooms I've ever stayed in. It had a down stairs that was complete with a bathroom, living room, dinning room, bed room and a balcony. It had a spiral staircase that led up to a loft with two queen size beds and a flat screen TV. I stayed up there with my sisters and even though they can be VERY annoying at times, we had lots of fun staying up until 1am and hanging out. The hotel was pretty nice, it had a pool, gym, spa, restaurant, and basically anything that most hotels have. It also had a nice golf course, but it rained too much so we couldn't play. Unfortunately it wasn't on the beach, but they had a shuttles that went back and forth to some beach front property that they owned. It had a pool, a bar, and jet ski's. The rain kept us inside for a lot of the time, but we still had tons of fun and it was an awesome experience.