I Run Like A Girl

Over the past week, my entire family spent the holidays together in our hometown Poughkeepsie, NY. With our busy lives and living so far apart, it’s hard for our family to get together, so the week was very much a treat as we all took time off from work/school to be together.

Our days were filled with being major home-bodies and lots of quality time with each other. For doing almost nothing productive the entire week, the days surprisingly flew by. We sat together each meal talking, laughing for hours, and in between we’d fill our time with games, movies, shopping, and more. Since there was no structure to our days, this post won’t be very structured either, to give you a glimpse of my time at home 🙂

One of the first festivities was our church Christmas party. We spent lots of time at church, and it was so nice to see the familiar faces we grew up with.

One of me and my sibling’s favorite traditions: decorating the Christmas tree. We blasted Christmas music while bringing the tree to life.

Gift exchange went super well this year! My siblings and I got our mom and ipad and she LOVED it. Although upon opening it, she thought it was a stick from the picture on the box…

Sissy and I went on a few sister-dates! We went on a shopping spree one day which was a highlight.

Also photoshoots. My sister is a super talented photographer and our shoots is always a fun activity we look forward to.

We ate a few meals out. Our family loves the Chinese buffet and our favorite local sushi spot.

Every night we would all gather together to watch a movie. One of my favorite traditions. Our favorites were Crazy Rich Asians and Taare Zameen Par.

A 1000-piece puzzle finished over the course of the week. Another family tradition.

I made lots of desserts for the family: tiramisu, apple crisps, and chocolate mousse. The biggest hit was the chocolate mousse; the recipe is super simple and delish and you can find it HERE.

All the free time meant lots of running happened. I spent a lot of time researching and thinking about my race plans for the spring…I finally chose to do a marathon in April and training officially begins this week! So excited!! I’ll write another post to reveal which one later this week! (It’s been a while since we’ve talked about running on this blog…ha)

The final highlight was seeing two of my best friends from New York. Michelle came up to Poughkeepsie from NYC one afternoon. I haven’t seen her since our California Hwy 1 road-trip in July, but we talk almost every day (via voice memos) so we were already caught up on each other’s lives, and we could just enjoy each other’s company as we went on an afternoon hike ❤

For New Year’s Eve, I headed down to NYC to see Christine. Christine threw a party at her apartment in Williamsburg, and it turned out to be SUCH a great time! Always count on Christine to get an awesome group of people together (I think I met most of my NYC friends through Christine :P). I hadn’t seen Christine in a year and I so missed her. She will be visiting me in SF next month and we are so looking forward to that.

And with that, we rang into 2019!! I feel so incredibly rejuvenated after my week with the family. Usually when I’m home, I’m working/studying/running errands, but this time was so much more relaxing; I felt truly present, and by the end I wish I had more time at home. There were so many sweet moments when our family was talking or joking together, when I wish I could just click the “pause” button and we could stay there and live under one roof again…but at the same time we are all pretty independent and doing great things with our own lives. It’s a great feeling to know I will always have this home to come back to. ❤

Last but not least, and you may have already noticed, I spent some time revamping the layout of this blog. I haven’t changed the format since creating it 2.5 years ago…and so it was time to spice it up. New year, new blog! 🙂