Merry Christmas!

We got a new camera the other day, so I am already on the computer checking out our pictures from this morning. Thought I'd share a few here. I'll write more another time.







This is actually from yesterday.

Christmas Eve

The girls are at Miss Lisa's for the morning. I'm working from home. Although, I have received no emails all morning, so I don't think much work is happening!!! :-) I've sent a few, but obviously people are either off or not focused on work.

Just planning to do some last minute wrapping and organizing today. We'll be heading to church for the "family" service at 5:00. It's somewhat short & very kid-friendly. Then, we are picking up pizza from Ledo's on the way home for Butch's birthday dinner. I need to figure out the cake sometime today! It's crazy to get one with all the cookies here. But, a birthday deserves a cake. Maybe I'll just buy a few cupcakes or something.

At some point, I'll head to the cemetery to take the wreath and cardinal mini-flag that we got for mom's grave. I should try to do that early before the rain starts this afternoon.

Since I'm talking about Mom, I thought I'd share an email that she sent to some people on Christmas Eve 1998. I think it went to Aunt Annie, maybe Mike (cousin), Ruby, and Bobbie Jo. It's a very good Christmas wish and reminder.

Hi All, Well, here it is again, Christmas Eve! You would think I was 6 years old. I woke up this a.m. about 5:00 and was so excited I couldn't lay in the bed. Couldn't wait to get up and start wrapping gifts and just look at the Christmas tree. Of course, the most wonderful thing is (after having a treatment yesterday) that I feel so alive! GOD IS GOOD! My Christmas wish for everyone is: I hope everyone feels as good for Christmas as I do now. Just remember this little quote from Victor Hugo - "Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones, and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. GOD IS AWAKE!" Hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas.

Love You All, Judy

Fun Christmas Videos!

You have to be patient with these. They take a while to load, but are quite entertaining.

http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/AMRRQ1x0xEjPBd3UXpgW


and


http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/k0F2nq3uYPPgZX9Z

Christmas Spirit Award!

My friend, Melissa tagged me weeks ago for this Christmas Spirit Award. And, I'm lame, so just getting to it!

The Rules are simple:

You must be a true Christmas lover to receive this award.

The person to whom you give the award must also be in love with Christmas.

You must link back to the person who gave you the award.

You must list 5 things that you love about Christmas. If you can't limit it to 5 things, then keep going till you run out of space! :o)

Pass the award along to as many people as you like. That can be 1 or 45; it's up to you. But, you must pass it on to at least one person in order to keep the Christmas cheer going!

Let your recipients know that you have tagged them by leaving them a comment on their blog.

And that's all! Pretty easy, eh?


5 Things I Love About Christmas:

~The tree and all the decorations
~Seeing Lacey's reaction to everything
~Cookies (a love/hate kind of thing)
~The music....I love singing along to it all in the car
~The excuse to have such a huge dinner with things you don't eat the rest of the year

Now I Tag:

Raechelle at (My New) Life Out Here
Gretchen at The Shierlock's

December Fun

What else has gone on in December? Lots of shopping. Lots of stress. Lots of wondering how to get it all done. :-)

Miss Lisa was out sick (high fever, etc.) for several days. The first few days (Wed.-Fri.), she couldn't get a backup and had to use her sick days. So, Butch & I juggled as parents do. We thought things would be fine by Monday, but her fever had only gone away for hours at a time. She had a sub for Monday (until 2:00), but I was worried about exposing the girls to whatever she had. And, I was going to NY for the day, so Butch would have needed to leave work early to pick them up. So, Jessica came over & babysat for us. Miss Lisa called on Monday afternoon to let me know she'd been to the doctor and found out she had bronchial pneumonia. Yikes. At least she was on antibiotics then. We went ahead & sent the girls on Tuesday since Miss Lisa had a sub again & promised not to be downstairs near the kids. By Friday, Miss Lisa was back to her normal schedule.

On one of those days with the girls at home, Lacey was in the living room and I was in the kitchen. She yelled "mommy, I see animals". I went to check and there were several turkey vultures out front. Weird. I've never seen them in our yard and they were just wandering around.


One of those days, Lacey helped me bake cookies. I bought the kind that you just have to pick up & put on the baking sheet, so she could do it on her own.

Earlier in the month, I had to go to NY (different trip than I mentioned above). My good friend, Tonya, needed to go as well, so she coordinated her trip to be there the same time as me. I went up a day early & stayed in her room with her. We only had a couple of hours before dinner, but walked around a bit. Then, we had dinner with our corporate attorney - who is much more fun that you might think a corporate attorney would be!


I am late getting Christmas cards out because these children don't like to cooperate for pictures. I could have just used the professional ones alone, but I like to take some in front of the tree, too. Here are a couple that did NOT get used!
I was planning to go to church this a.m., but we had freezing rain. I wasn't willing to head out in that. So, I'm making some cookies. And, I finished the cards (minus a couple I need addresses for). I'm off tomorrow and Butch's vacation starts tomorrow. We're going to look at new cameras. That was our anniversary gift to each other ... and here it is 2 months later .... without the new camera! Hopefully we'll find a good one and get used to it before Christmas.

Off to finish cookies.....and play with Lacey since she's been begging for a bit!

Christmas Cookie Party and a Visit with Santa

Yesterday we had an afternoon of parties! We headed to a friend's house for her annual Cookie Party (a few snacks other than cookies....but mostly lots of yummy cookies)! The kids had fun. It's hard because all of the toys are in her basement and that's where the girls want to be. But, all the adults are upstairs. Butch was in the basement quite a bit since there were only a few people we knew there and they are friends I used to work with.

Then, we headed to my Aunt Marilyn's house to visit Santa. Her brother was visiting from Houston and plays Santa. He starts growing his beard in April in order for it to be nice & long for Christmas. Lacey didn't want to get close to him at first. Leah was happy to see him, but not be on his lap.

In advance - sorry for the blurry pictures. We aren't sure if it was operator error or the camera itself.


Lacey wouldn't look at the camera.

We had gone into the other room when we were done. Santa wandered in a few minutes later and sat down. Lacey walked over to him and started talking again. I have no idea what the conversation was about, but she was very serious - so was Santa.

Thanksgiving

I know, I know.....you thought I fell off the face of the earth. Or at least forgot all about you. I didn't. It has just been so crazy busy these last few weeks that blogging doesn't get done.

We had a really nice Thanksgiving week. Chuck & Nancy arrived on the Sunday before. Lacey was thrilled to see them again and Leah warmed up pretty quickly. Leah can say something that resembles Poppy or PaPa (for Chuck and my dad), but can't do Grandma, so she has taken to calling Nancy "Nana". It will be interesting to see if it sticks.

Tuesday (I think), I took the day off and Nancy & I went shopping. I wanted to get something new to wear for our portrait session on Wednesday. On Wednesday, our appointment for pictures was at 4:00. I thought this was a great time because we could get pictures done, then head to eat at Red Robin while waiting for them to print them. It didn't go that way. We were called back at 5:00. As you can imagine, Leah was not very cooperative after having to hang out for an hour. I had learned from another customer that they wait to even view your pictures was 30 minutes. So....the store agreed to hold the digital pictures for us to view on Friday morning. We headed to Red Robin for dinner, but Leah (and Lacey) weren't exactly thrilled to be eating out and confined.

Thanksgiving was at Dee's house. I had hunted down Butterscotch Brickle from Tastefully Simple and brought that as an appetizer (with apples). Yum-o! We had a very good linner (lunch/dinner) of stuffed ham, fried turkey, oven roasted turkey, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli casserole, green bean casserole, corn pudding, mandarin orange salad, and rolls. So good. Even though I ate small amounts of everything, I was still stuffed. The whole reason for linner (at 3:00ish) is so we can let it digest and be able to eat dessert without bursting. We had a choice of 4 pies. Mmmmmmm.

Oh - I almost forgot - Dee burned her hand pretty badly while preparing food. She was planning to put a casserole dish on the stove top to warm a bit and checked to make sure the burner was off. She touched the burner and it was still on. Not the best thing to do. I do it all the time, but wow....she had a bad burn for a few days.

Friday, Butch & I headed out early with the girls to go see the pictures that were taken on Wednesday. We were amazed to see that there were several good ones.
This was an "okay" family picture, but not the best. The better one is on the Christmas card, so I'm not posting it here. :-)And, since Chuck & Nancy were in town, we thought we should get some with all of us.

That night, we headed to "The Square" in Leonardtown (about 30 min. south of us) for the tree lighting. It was nice, but we didn't last for the actual tree lighting. It was much colder than we'd realized and I was worried about the kids. Plus, we'd already seen everything and the lighting was still about an hour away.

After getting home, we got Leah to bed. Then, Butch & I headed out to meet some friends for drinks. We ended up back at their house and playing a drinking game of Uno.....not realizing how late it was. (I blame Butch. :-)) I had told him when we got to M and C's that we needed to keep an eye on the clock and not stay long. Nancy was sort of waiting up for us - to make sure that Brady didn't bark when we got home. Well....we got home around 2:30. And, I was super hungover the next day. So bad. Ouch. I think I got so excited to have a night out (they are so rare) that I lost control. So, Saturday, was spent resting. I felt much better after napping when Lacey & Leah napped.

Saturday night, "the girls" (Nancy, Dee, Kristina, Jessica, Georgia and I) took Lacey to see Beauty & the Beast at the Port Tobacco Players in La Plata. It was really, really good! I don't think I've mentioned to any of those that went -- I found out that the guy who played Lumiere is a senior in high school. He was the best! Lacey managed to stay awake for the entire show (until 10:40) and she really liked it. Afterwards, "Belle" was up on stage taking pictures with kids and surprisingly, Lacey went to her. I was shocked.
Oh - I forgot to mention that Lacey wore her Belle dress to the show. Many people commented on it.

Lacey was really wound up when we got home. I think she finally fell asleep around 12:20.

On Sunday, we got out the tree and Christmas decorations. In the afternoon, Lacey, Leah & I went to a birthday party for a 3 year old from their daycare. It was tea party & so cute!

Whew. I'm surprised I remembered all of that!