Holiday happenings

After months and months of sticking around the house on the weekends due to massive and cumulative sleep deprivation (Gabriel will be a year old in just six weeks ... at some point he has to figure out how to sleep through the night, right?), well, we finally decided that enough was enough and we needed to get out.

So on New Year's night we drove downtown to see the lights ... of which I somehow neglected to get any good photos.  But we did capture the girls' first cotton candy experience.  It was great until they dropped it.  Ah well, never too young to learn to hold on tight, right?

Then on Thursday we headed up to Gudauri, the ski resort about two hours north of Tbilisi.  There wasn't enough snow on the bunny slope to teach the kids to ski, but we did a little sledding and then rode the gondola up where there was more snow and a few skiers - and a killer view of thick cloud cover floating slightly below the peaks.  Natasha worked on her snow-angel technique.

Yesterday we went to a New Year's kids' performance of Zolushka (Cinderella) at a theater downtown.  The girls were enraptured.  We will try to hit some more performances like this before we leave town.  They are just at the age to start enjoying them.

Then today we made a gingerbread house.  I had actually baked the pieces a couple weeks ago, but today we assembled it.  It is not structurally sound and I fully expect that it will have collapsed by tomorrow morning, but the girls had fun.