Another pandemic-driven low-key birthday celebration day.

It's turning into a white winter, with snow more days than not. It's so far been a lot of light snows, but it seems never ending. The forecast looks worse, with temperatures starting to trend down from barely above freezing to a little below.

We did a little bit of a lunchtime birthday celebration, with cake and a card for dad, and gifts and cake for the little. We're getting into smaller celebrations as the kids get older, and dad barely needs more stuff, so it worked out to have some builder kits for the little, and cake for everyone, especially dad.

After, we jumped in the car to head to the mall to do some Secret Santa shopping. We're planning to have the older kids and their kids, our grandkids, over next weekend for a little bit of an early Christmas gathering. "Kids of divorced parents, who were kids of divorced parents," I say a lot. Makes for a lot of little celebrations spread out across the city or state, depending on which parent moved where.

Since the adults are pretty much settled in the "stuff" category, we thought to do a Secret Santa thing for the kids. We agreed that each kid would get a kid from a different house for whom they'd get a gift. Then each house would get stuff for the kids of the other houses. Houses would do their own thing separately, and then avoid any gaps in "fairness," as each kid should get something like three things or small sets of things."

We hit the mall and did some shopping. It was a lot tougher than we thought. Of course, we had to deal with a bunch of "I'd like this" in varying degrees from "at some point" to "now!" We thought the kids shopping for kids would help some, but our oldest got paired with the group's youngest, and our youngest got a paired with the group's oldest, so there was some gap in what each thought the other might like. We got it all worked out, after visiting a couple stores and a swing by Target, we had a pretty good angle on what the kids were getting their pairs, and even a couple things from our house to some kids.

We were leaning on hangry, but felt accomplished, so we rolled into The Cheesecake Factory, which happened to be our exit from the mall. Walking by, there seemed to be plenty of room. We were just a little ahead of what we thought a dinner rush might be, so we thought to go for it. It took a half hour to get a table, the server kept apologizing for her absence during the first half of our meal as she also had a large, demanding group. We weren't demanding, and once we had something to drink and snack on, were fine waiting. Dinner was fine, but helped tip our overall thinking towards "let's stop eating out," between the way restaurants seem run now, the way costs have skyrocketed, and because our kids have lost all patience and manners when we go out. They don't have patience or manners at home any more, either, but at least they only disturb us, and have other places to go and things to do when things get out of hand (like when "quit looking at me" happens).

We got home, unloaded the car, started settling and all is well again. Tummies full, dessert for after kids go to bed, and most of the necessary gifts gotten.

Everyone's healthy.