2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 20 – How to Celebrate Without Going Crazy

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Celebrating the Many, Many Joys of Christmas

This is an essay I wrote today about struggling with not getting to do every last thing that you wanted to do for Christmas.

Things like putting up lights on the house make me sad when I miss them because I know how much the kids would love them, but sometimes you just need to put in perspective the things that you have done and not beat yourself up over the ones that you didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s tough. But Christmastime is way to much fun to spend it being down on yourself over a few strands of garland or some Christmas cards that everyone will have thrown in the trash in a month anyways…

oh poopies…

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So apparently I had a hard drive crash in my Plex server while we were on vacation last week.

Possibly two … still looking into that!

What’s really weird is that throughout the whole week, whenever I’d connect remotely (we typically tether Sara’s iPad to the TV so the kids can watch their shows on the road), the drive that holds most of the kids movies & TV shows was reporting as missing … however when I got home and finally had a chance to troubleshoot, it turns out that drive was fine and it was a completely different one that was clicking away like a hard drive on its last legs!

…one that oddly enough, we were able to connect to on vacation…

Now I’ve got that one unplugged until I can see if I’m able to copy the contents over to a new drive … need to address that sooner rather than later because it’s the drive where all of our new TV shows download to before they get copied to wherever they actually live.

As for the other impacted drive … I don’t know what the deal is there because it mounts ok, but the OS just doesn’t recognize it. Really hoping it’s something I can easily repair so that I don’t have to hassle with re-downloading everything…

I mean, the first one doesn’t really surprise me because it was one of the oldest drives in the server (almost 3 years old) and it honestly gets a lot more use than all of the others. If anything, I can’t help but think that if I had already been able to upgrade to my shiny, new rackmount NAS, the system would’ve recovered automatically and this would’ve barely counted as a blip on the radar!

That said, I’m happy that at least Plex itself is up again because I’ve had it down for two days now because the NAS part didn’t want to reboot thanks to the dying drive, so at least the kids can go back to watching their usual shows without having to “borrow” Grandma & Grandpa’s Netflix account.

It’s kind of amazing how much you end up relying on this stuff without realizing it. I definitely need to start exploring some backup options next year as this 50 TB media library continues to grow. 😛

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 19 – Glittery Porch Pirate Revenge

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We’ve been pretty lucky in that I’m not sure if we’ve ever had a package stolen off of our porch.

A few weeks ago I had a couple mis-delivered to a neighbor’s house, but they were very cool about it.

Fun Fact – When I was still living in my first apartment, I actually had a neighbor accuse me of stealing their packages because the FedEx guy had dropped them on my doorstep by mistake and I’d pulled them inside to take over to their house after work the next day! The lady left me like a page-long letter taped to my door about reporting me to the police and the building managers because they needed that package to take to her parents house that weekend.

Needless to say, I hope that stupid printer jammed whenever they tried to print anything that their Grinch of a daughter sent to them… 😯

Now that said … this video is still amazingly satisfying!

It’s by Mark Rober, who worked for NASA on the Mars rover, and he goes into incredible detail describing his engineering process before finally showing what this little payback device can do to someone who dares to steal from kids at Christmastime.

P.S. +1 for the fart spray 😉

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 17 – The Gift of Date Night

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One last advent blog post from our vacation, and something that we were a healthy mixture of nervous and excited about, was the opportunity for us to enjoy a night out…

…without the kids…

It’s something that we’ve really only done a handful of times, always relying on family and sometimes even waiting until the kids were already in bed. We admittedly didn’t really know what to do about finding a sitter between having three rambunctious boys to deal with and then two of them being special needs on top of that.

But Sara ended up finding this local service called Doublemint which offers a variety of sitters who are trained to work with all sorts of children, and because they have people all around the state of Florida, it wasn’t really a big deal for one of their folks in Orlando to come to our hotel for the evening and watch the kids right in our room … which honestly was a nice bonus because we weren’t sure how they were going to take to it because they’ve never had a babysitter before.

And that said, apparently … they did awesome. 😀

We hired a sitter to watch the boys from 6pm – 10pm with the intent that we were only walking over to Jambo House for dinner at Jiko, so we’d be close if anything were to happen.

Well, it turns out that what happened was these kids were fast asleep before we even got dessert, with David even asking the sitter if he could go to bed!!!

I guess occasionally skipping naptime has its perks after all. 😉

So we had a wonderful, adult dinner – I had lobster tails, and I didn’t have to share a bite with anyone.

Afterwards we wandered around the grounds and checked out all of the savannah viewing areas at night, which actually ended up being pretty cool because we got a chance to try out night vision goggles to look out at the animals!

Then we did a little secret Christmas shopping, wandered back to Kidani and checked out the comparatively quiet savannah there, and that was that.

Date night is honestly something that has slipped quite a bit in our lives since becoming parents, and it’s weird because before we had kids Sara and I would go out to eat and see movies and spend late nights at the parks all of the time …  so needless to say we were both quite pleased with how easy Doublemint made sneaking out for a couple of hours, and hopefully in the new year it will be something that we can do for ourselves every few months to help keep the sanity by giving us a night away from the chaos!

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 16 – The Great Santa Wait!

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So apparently Santa is a busy guy this time of year … have you ever waited six hours to see Santa?!?!?!

Woof!

After checking in to meet Santa sometime around 1pm, needless to say we did just about everything we could think of to kill time all afternoon while we waited.

We had lunch at the new Chicken Guy restaurant … which wasn’t bad.

We did some shopping, including buying Lego cars for Christopher and David … which was kind of fun to build to pass some time.

We went to the movies and watched Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas … or at least we tried to! I don’t know why I keep thinking that our kids are ready for the movies because they’re very much not… 😛

We even rode the train a couple of times … which is always a surprising favorite whenever we visit Disney Springs, even though it’s very much a 3rd party-operated ride and you have to pay money for it and everything.

But eventually … when the 7 o’clock hour finally rang … Santa sent us a text message announcing that he was finally prepared for our arrival!

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 15 – At Home with the Animals…

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It’s pretty common when we stay at a Disney resort to find ourselves saying afterwards that we wished we’d spent less time running around the parks and more time enjoying our resort itself.

Well, between the age of the kids and somewhat gloomy weather all week, I’m happy to say that this vacation we did exactly that!

Animal Kingdom Lodge is perfect for lounging because the atmosphere itself is both relaxing and exciting with all of the animals, and as a bonus for the kids, they actually had quite a few different activities that they could partake in between Jambo House and Kidani Village. In addition to just getting super excited spotting all of the animals, the boys also had a chance to learn a little about ecosystems and conservation from one of the cast members, Christopher worked on a scavenger hunt which gave him a chance to practice talking to people, and he and Sara also played a fun game finding various landmarks around Africa on a map.

Vacationing is definitely different with kids because try as I might, you can’t exactly just lay around all day and take in the ambiance in the manner which I would currently prefer, but nonetheless I think they all had a great time and we didn’t spend nearly as much time fighting with lines in the parks, so that’s a huge win in my book!!!

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 14 – Dinner with Mickey & Friends

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Today took us to Epcot where we had dinner at the Garden Grill, along with Mickey, Pluto, and Chip and Dale, too!

Our original intent was to watch the Candlelight Processional afterwards, but it was kind of drizzly all day and I had a very low tolerance for dealing with the rain plus cranky kid attitudes on account of said rain.

I was also a little miffed that we finally found ourselves in the park while the DVC Member Lounge was actually open at the Imagination Pavilion, but still didn’t get to go because there’s no accommodation for strollers and I didn’t feel like breaking the party up…

Anyways, we ended up just having dinner and then taking the opportunity to give the boys a couple of rides on the monorail instead, which they ended up enjoying just fine! 😀

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 13 – Once Upon a Christmastime at Christmas

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We originally weren’t going to do Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party this year because it was too expensive, but there ended up being a mix-up with our room and Disney gave us comped tickets anyways!

This is always a great party for the atmosphere – snow blowing down Main Street, complimentary cookies and hot chocolate (that were actually complimentary this time!), and just the characters and other happenings that aren’t normally out during a normal day at the Magic Kingdom. Believe it or not, I even danced with Christopher because after he spotted the dance party at Cosmic Ray’s when we were on the hunt for cookies, surprisingly he just had to be a part of it himself!

What can I say – parenting brings out parts of ourselves that we never knew we had in us… 😉

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 12 – Strike a Family Pose

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Today was on and off stressful, as most days with our kids tend to be, but this picture represents one of the happy, little moments when everybody was in a good mood and looking in the same direction and everything!

I’m honestly not sure who gave him the stickers, or why they gave him so many, but I’ll have you know that he was definitely somehow wearing one curled up as a tail while this particular shot was taken… 😯