Peace and happiness

     We had a beautiful Christmas. We had good food, presents, romanian carols on the radio, friends, and love all around us. With Catalina growing up, I wanted her to know the traditions we grew up with in Romania. Christmas eve we are supposed to fast, so we have a special sweet dish, called "Jesus' diapers" They are very fine dough layers filled with walnuts, sugar and orange zest. Back home, my mom actually made the dough layers. This is a VERY tricky part, as the layers need to be transparent thin, and after that cooked fast on hot steel sheets. I cheated, bought fillo dough and cooked it in the hot oven. I have to say the result was awesome and I was very proud of myself. A very good start to Christmas preparations.

We tried to teach Catalina some romanian carols, but the american ones won. She kept singing in the house "Ji'ggle bells, ji'ggle bells" for quite some time, so we were confident she'll be able to carol for grandparents. Indeed she did!

Christmas eve we decided we'll let Catalina open most of her presents. They were a lot! She received a kitchen play set she loved. This gave mommy and daddy plenty of time for themselves, as our cutie pie played fascinated by herself more than half an hour.

Of course, her nana sent way too many cool presents, and she made sure played with all of them the same night. This one below is a cute lady bug tent that when fully assembled occupies half of our living room.

Well, not such a big deal when you get this smile on her face!

However, the only present that Catalina recognizes as coming from Santa is the one that grandma sent from Romania. A beautiful colored pencil set and coloring books. The moment she opened those, she dropped whatever she was doing and screamed: "cheion, mama, schie", a.k.a: crayons, mama, write!

We all received presents. Some bigger, some smaller. Here are the extremes :)

When the excitement started to go down, we went to bed, in hope we'll still have some romanian carolists from church. We fell asleep before, but here is a nice picture of my favorite elves:

One can think that after all that Christmas day did not have anything new to offer. Not quite the case. Even more presents, food and friends. Like I said, a good Christmas.

Evening came and our table was still full of food, our hearts filled with love and happiness. And our house spotless clean (not).

Merry Christmas to all our family and friends! We love you all and wish you were here with us.

We are back to work for now, but fun begins once more in less than 4 days. We anticipate a very nice New Year celebration (hoping that everybody is healthy, weather does not go crazy and airlines do not go on strike). The reason: we'll have majorly cool entertainment:

                                                       The Foss family!!