Peter is 8 months old!

And we made it through Christmas. Peter is still a happy, babbling baby. He notices new things now, and becomes quickly bored with all of his old toys. Cupboards full of breakable serving platters are SO much more interesting than a tired old Sophie giraffe. Not crawling yet, but that adventure is just over the horizon...

The more Peter grows, the more things stay the same. Martin is still sick. Erika will never again make a 12-layer mocha cake. It was wonderful having Erika's parents in town for too short a time.

I received a personalized L.L. Bean place mat and a purple, knit octopus for Christmas, but my favorite Christmas gift was the stuffed wolf that Uncle Bill gave to the entire Kosina family. We hang out in front of the gas fire together. More often than not these days, as the weather in San Francisco has been feeling really cold to us lately. Cold, that is, until we check out the temperatures in some of the places our friends and family live (Prague, Portland, New York, Minnesota - BRRR!).

Our biggest Christmas adventure was dinner on Christmas Eve. Erika ordered the traditional Willett feast (Dungeoness crab) from our favorite local butcher, expecting to pick up four nicely cracked crustaceans on December 24 for a quick, low-maintenance meal. Upon arriving at the (slammed) butcher store, she was told that her crabs were waiting, but they weren't cracked. In fact, they weren't even dead. Fast forward a few hours later to introducing Peter to CLAWS out on the deck, and George and Laurene Willett to the rescue. They've done this before. Without even a whimper, the crabs slipped into two nice hot tubs prepared especially for them and an hour later we had a lovely dinner.

That's about all I have right now, except a quick plug for the movie Milk. Erika and Martin saw this film about the life of Harvey Milk a few weeks ago at the Castro theater, and Erika had tears in her eyes at the end, when a PACKED 1400-seat theater stood and clapped as the credits rolled. What a life. What a film. What a place to see it. It really puts proposition 8 into perspective.