What a wonderful Christmas season. But after celebrating Christmas v1.0 (Idaho), v2.0(Sarah, Maria and I) and v3.0 (the dos Remedios family)…I’m exhausted. I don’t recall ever being so overwhelmed by Christmas…one of the worst problems that come with getting older I guess. How sad.
On Christmas day, we spent most of the day prepping for the big Christmas dinner. The intention of the dinner this year was to keep it simple and small. Grandma Judy, bless hear heart, invited a few neighbors just so they’d have a place to go for their holiday meal. That’s when the wheels came off. ALL of the neighbors that were invited accepted. Then, Ken’s son, Tim and his family called a few days before Christmas and shared that they too were coming to visit on Christmas day. Quickly, the group of 7 that we started with became a group of 18.
Tim, Stacia, Mitch and Sam made it around 4:00. It was great to see them. They hadn’t seen Maria since last Christmas. The twins were very excited to see her. Maria did her shy thing for a little while…but she was pretty quick to be playing with Sam. By the end of the night…she was pretty much rotating between the two and having a great time with them.
The dinner was fantastic…and while it was a larger group, everyone blended nicely. The highlight for me was the introduction of Green Dessert to the Meyers family…which was especially good this year as it was easy for me to eat.
They day after Christmas we packed up and got on the road as quickly as we could so we wouldn’t be driving in the dark. The drive home was completely different then the drive over. Maria took a nap…Lucy napped pretty much the entire way…no tickets…and we made great time (7 hours)!
Once we got home we took some time to unpack and settle…then we held Christmas v2.0. We had a good time, the four of us, opening our gifts to each other and enjoyed being home. Maria’s favorite gift was probably an Abby Cadabby doll. (She’s a fairy from Sesame Street who turns things into pumpkins…I didn’t know a few months ago either.)
Yesterday, we had the dos Remedios family over for Christmas v3.0…Jake’s grandpa, “Grandpa Bob” who is visiting from Los Angeles was also able to join us. We made up a pretty fantastic brunch if I do say so myself. Tried a couple new recipies that were great. Wish I had taken some pictures…bummer. Again, another fun time sharing gifts with each other. Our spoiled little girl was again overwhelmed with amazing gifts…she scored BIG TIME with her very own toy vacuum. She LOVES “helping” anyone with a vacuum cleaner…so now she has her own to do some vacuuming herself.
After it was all said and done, we had a great time celebrating Christmas with our family…and enjoyed another year of very generous gifting. Thank you all!
Below are a few videos to share…the first two videos are both cute and short. The first of Maria looking for my parents cat, Nutella, at Sarah’s Mom’s house. Nutella likes hiding in bathroom drawers and cabinets. The second, I’ll just call it a montage of Santa celebrations. The third video is a “Directors Cut – Grandparent Only – Extended Version”…it’s just over 9 minutes long. Feel free to watch if you’d like…but you better have a decent high speed connection, and a bit of time. Consider yourself warned.
And now for pictures…
Well…I’m off to attempt to finish off one of the beds in our back yard. Yes, it’s the project that has been going on for about 6 months. Probably should have only taken a couple weekends…but we’ve been lazy and limited on extra free time. We would love to have it done before the ground freezes again…and it would be great to be able to have some dirt delivered in early Spring so we could have them completely functional this Summer.