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And the Christmas Tree is up in our house. Everybody so happy and gathering around it today as Nicole finished setting it up with all our ornaments from over the years. The girls are excited.

As Laia and Sofia still in their pajamas watch the parade in the downstairs living room while multi-tasking on their iPads of course

This weekend we attended two swim meets, one for Sofia (Patriot Games) and one for Laia (SCC Turnkey Distance).

It was only Saturday so we had most of the weekend available to us. I was on the stands for Laia's meet and was able to take a few shots. She raced the 500 yard freestyle event, and did well, moving up very close to a BB time.

Laia has to submit a picture of when she was 2 for her 8th grade year book. Last night I spent a few minutes putting the potential pictures on a virtual scrapbook so she can see them easily and pick one that she likes best. Here it is:

Laia at 2 years old

A friend of Nicole's shared this challenge that they gave his kid in school. The kid is in second grade and going to a gifted and talented program. Seems harder than it is when you sit down, it requires very good understanding on how addition works - which sounds easy, but...

You have 9 letters to solve, and each one can have a value between 0 and 9, so 10 values. No number can be repeated, so that becomes permutations of 10 over 9, i.e. the number of ways you can assign one of 10 values to 9 items, without repetition allowed, and with saying that every time you change the order it is a different arrangement. That is technically P(10,9) = 10! which is over 3 million combinations! Luckily they give us some breaks, including the fact that T and D cannot be 0, along with a few other clues that reveal themselves as you attempt to solve it.

I was trying to do it in my head at first, but that did not wok. I had to get old school pen and paper, and work through it.