A Canadian Christmas Vacation

This year I swore that Christmas vacation was going to feel like Christmas vacation...no two day drives to sunshine...no chaining myself to my phone or the internet...no, I was going to chill the @#$% out and do something easy peasy and Canadian for once.  So we went to Ottawa...to -24 degree temps, and horrifying road conditions.  Meh...we wanted Canadian.

We stopped by and visited our old Brooklyn buddies, the Cowgerellis, in Ottawa...we ate food, drank copious amounts of wine, shuffled the odd beer into the mix...even jammed a maple-bacon doughnut in our faces...'twas a beauty time.  Of course, an enormous part of what makes it always such a beauty time is that the girls pretty much occupy themselves, which leaves us grown ups to enjoy, well...whatever the hell we want to.  The only trouble with letting the girls loose on each other is that we typically discover that 48 hrs is about the window where intelligent and audacious little five year old girls can get along without a hitch...anything after that and every half hour something is someone else's fault and f#$%ing everyone wants to be "Elsa."  The girls love each other but lack the skills to set each other straight once in awhile, and have no idea how to take the absolute minimal amount of one another's crap...but for 48 blissful hours, these girls are pretty much standing up in each other's wedding parties, and going to Cabo together.  It's sweet...and then it's trying on parents still trying to sleep while their first born feisty females try to decide who woke who up and why.  So we separate them...talk to them...try to interject some f@#$ing perspective, and then watch them slip from pissing one another off to cuddling.  It's insane...but the photo ops can be brilliant.

If you don't have yourself some Mel and Jeff Cowger I highly recommend you get some...just not ours.