21,22/30: Keystone

I blew it.  I totally forgot to post yesterday and when I remembered, after several glasses of wine, at 12:02am, I realized I didn’t have internet access anyway.  We were up in the mountains (~1hr from here) at our friends’ condo, which was just awesome.  The kids had a blast and we got to spend really quality time with some very close friends of ours.  I’ve blogged about my friend from college, Kaakpema, and his new wife, Sara, before.  They were the ones who had that INSANELY beautiful wedding in Denver last summer.  Well, Finley fell head over heels IN LOVE with their new puppy, Jack proudly slept in the top bunk, and Shane enjoyed eating snow, staring at the fire, and letting the puppy lick pancake off his tongue (not joking – it made me throw up in my mouth to watch that happen, but he thought it was hilarious). 

Travis and Kaakpema pretended to be old men, with their gin & tonics and their cigars, and Sara and I got to spend time talking.  The 4 of us had some really interesting, really good talks about life, where we see ourselves headed in the long-term, our family goals, career goals, and parenting.  Kaakpema and I met because we were both athletes at Brown, so we had some long talks about kids in sports, what we were thankful for, and what we might do differently with our own kids regarding sports.  We also talked about the complexities of parenting kids who might struggle with racial identity / cultural identity challenges at some point in the future.  It was just really nice to finally get time with our friends in a setting that allowed us to stay up late catching up on life and talking about stuff that really matters to all of us.  I can’t wait until they have kids so we can navigate a lot of these things as parents together!

This boy should SO be on the cover of Baby Gap!  Oh well, their loss…

Anyway, I have a TON of stuff to get done this week for the Derm Dept., so I need to get cracking.  I tried to take a Christmas card pic of my kids while we were in Keystone, so let me know what you think.  I could NOT get the “I’m-taking-a-dump-here-people” look off Shane’s face.  This was his best effort when I asked him to smile:)  He tried so hard it actually looked painful!  And yes, that is a bow in Jack’s hair.  I tired to put it towards the top of his head, but it still showed up in the pictures.  At any rate, this year’s picture is one to remember!  Here are a few:

YAY!  My camera is back!!!