Stuff I Learned On My Winter Vacation

1. When you have one child and two weeks off, you gotta schedule the playdates.

2. My friends have really, really nice kids. Who knew?

3. I love Jane. (That I knew. Visit us more often, please!)

4. Latkes are good, but apple fritters are better. And still count for the "eat fried stuff" commandment. Also, the "corned" part of the label "corned beef brisket" means something.

5. A "bro-date" is when two straight men have private social time together (courtesy of the Survivor finale.)

6. The free Kid Care at the gym still rocks, even if they only give you 90 minutes now instead of two hours.

7. Christmas lights are one of those things to which Mae West's statement applies: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."

8. I don't care for eggnog.

9. If you make multiple batches of fudge, you will eat multiple batches of fudge.

10. If you get a Chinese foot massage for $20 and hear chain saws from the next room, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will be systematically dismembered when the hour is up (though you should tip well just in case.)

11. Don't talk politics with your mother, but do eat her Hoppin' John on New Years Day--it's supposed to be good luck all year, and anyway it's tasty.

12. If you think playing in "real" snow in a San Diego park on a 70 degree day sounds pretty cool, chances are the rest of the city does, too.

13. If you're able to nap without interruption through Alvin and the Chipmunks, it means your kid really enjoyed the movie.

14. Giving international guests a tour of the cliffs, waves and seals of La Jolla Cove on a sunny day in January is a pretty sweet reminder of San Diego's myriad charms. Not to mention the serve-your-own fro-yo afterward.

15 Shivering in the rain for three hours while your kid and friends' kids play at the park shows you were just that starved for adult conversation.

16. You can create worlds of wonder with coffee cups, drinking straws and Scotch tape.

17. Three hours on a private yacht with friends does not suck.

18. Ethiopian food disproves my theory that lentils taste like dirt, injera bread is made with a grain called teff, and using it as a utensil beats the hell out of eating with a fork.

19. I already seem to have forgotten most of what I did in the past two weeks, as if school vacations come with a rare form of sanity-protecting amnesia.

20. There are no sweeter words than "Yay! Back to preschool today!"

Edited to add: Link to Tara Donovan is fixed!