Busy Christmas Week!

Because of our baby due in less than six weeks, John and I had decided this fall that we would stay home for Christmas. We thought this would make the Christmas season less busy and more restful:) Well, we did stay in town, but instead made our Christmas week really busy:

On the Tuesday before Christmas, we closed on a house! The above picture is our first meal in our new house. The house is in great shape and was move-in-ready. The former owners had made everything clean and neat and ready for us. They even left curtains for us - so everything was ready for new occupants. This was a really good thing, because our first night there on Wednesday would find not only us, but 11 members of our family in the house!On Wednesday, with the help of many friends from church and my family who had arrived the night before, we moved everything out of our apartment and into our new house!
We had worked up an appetite by lunch time and had our first big meal with friends in our new house.
By evening, most of the boxes were unpacked, our new table and chairs had been assembled and we were feeling comfortably settled in the house. We enjoyed chili and cornbread for supper and had a nice evening with my family. John's family arrived later that night, so we had a lot of fun Christmas eve with both sides of the family playing our favorite game this year Ticket to Ride (Both US and German on different tables - the German version is even more fun as it has additional ways to earn points!)

After many games, we were ready for some exercise and so headed outside where my sisters had made snow people to represent me and John and our future children! I somehow doubt though that we'll have 15 midget children!

We paused for a group picture before the walk. Some neighbors seeing us all assembled probably wondered how many people had moved into that house!

The walk didn't remain calm for long! Soon almost everyone was involved with a snow ball fight. There was just enough snow along the road to refuel occasionally.

The walk felt really nice!

We sang some Christmas songs that evening and opened our gifts before bed.

Christmas day brought more good food as everyone pitched in to make a wonderful turkey dinner.

On Saturday, my brother Luke and his family arrived to bring even more energy and fun to our gathering. We enjoyed some Indian food prepared by John and his dad for lunch!

Our nieces and nephews are growing up fast so it was great to see them once again!

So, that was our week of Christmas! It was definitely a bit of a whirlwind week. My family had to leave early on Sunday and we spent a lot of time Sunday and Monday sleeping and relaxing. Now, John is back to work and we're enjoying spending a few more days with his family before they have to go back home.

A Superb Evening!

Back on January 1st (when we visited Alabama), we spent the day with one set of friends and then headed over to see our friends, the Pace family that evening.

We enjoyed a game of crazy way skip-bo. The rules of which are crazy indeed. My sister and I made it up way back when I was 10 or 12. Being able to exchange skip-bos, pick the number that matches your pile and discard all your cards each turn makes the game a lot of fun.

She's not sure if she should show off her octopus. . .

While her brother is glad to do so!

After the younger children went upstairs, us "older kids" had a wonderful dinner together. We enjoyed ourselves with some great conversation.

I have been so blessed to have a great friendship with this family over the years. They were so gracious to share their anniversary evening with us. We had a wonderful time together!

(This picture is just for fun - I guess you can tell which ones are the engineers who aren't any good at looking at the camera before we're told to smile!)

Our first Christmas and New Years together as a married couple was spent with many friends and family members. We definitely had a great time with everyone we had a chance to see!

Christmas with John's Family

I know that Christmas is long gone, but as I haven't yet blogged my Christmas picutres, here they come! We were able to spend Christmas in Southern Illinois with John's family which we enjoyed immensly.

Wrapping the last few presents.

Anita precisely (and beautifully) wrapping a gift. She has great style and a love of detail that comes through even in the gift wrap.

John illustrating the family tradition of pickout presents and delivering them to their recipient (at which point the recipient does the same thing).

Once all the gifts are delivered, then the unwrapping begins.

Lisa ensures that we're not without music!

We enjoyed a few walks in the 'warmer' weather with our family.

John was eager to be of service when I needed a footrest!

Christmas is almost here!

In just a few days, Christmas will be here!  We only have two more days of work in 2008 - it's really hard to believe that time has gone that fast.  I am looking forward to spending time with our families and friends.  Life has been busy and when time is at minimum, blogging is usually the first thing to go.  But I do have a few minutes for a short random update right now.

We had fun going Christmas caroling last night with our church.  It has been really cold so it was nice to jump back into a warm car after each house/nursing home that we went to.  Christmas has kinda snuck up on me this year.  It's always a busy time, but this year has been exceptionally so as we've moved, spent 2 weekends in other states, had friends over 5 times and more in just the last 5 weeks!  So our plan today is to go shopping for Christmas presents!  I'm sure we're not the only ones with this plan today and I'm looking forward to hopefully finding gifts for each family member on our list.  Sunday will be busy with Church in the morning where John is playing an arrangement on his violin with 3 flutes and the piano.  Then on Sunday night we have a family Christmas service where many families will be singing songs together.  We're singing with the Lanhams as we've pretty much been 'adopted' into their family here.  John is also accompanying a couple families on the piano.

So that's a bit about our life.  Time passes by so quickly and often I think of many of you who read this blog and wonder what's going on in your lives.   I hope that in this Christmas busyness that you are able to pause and remember our Savior Jesus Christ.

Merry Christmas!

I'm in Kansas City for Christmas at my Aunt and Uncle's house this year, and am once again enjoying my time here. Time with family is always filled with lots of food and tons of games. We slept in this morning and then played sequence. While we played sequence, I actually joined facebook. I know, I'm a bit behind the times. I've kind of avoided joining things like facebook or myspace just as I waited a long time before starting a blog. But when I found out today that Lydia had posted some pictures that I wanted to see on facebook and realized I had plenty of time to mess around with it since I have the laptop with me, I decided now was a good time to join. I don't intend to spend a lot of time on facebook, but it will be fun to use it to keep up with family and friends who use it to post pictures.


We spent the afternoon playing clue and then basketball. Basketball with our cousins has been a fun two year "tradition." My team barely pulled ahead thanks to some awesome ball handleling and shots by my cousins and dad! I like basketball, but am not very good at it though I do have a lot of fun playing.

After dinner, we got to play chicken feet with Grandma and Grandpa. Chicken feet is a game with dominos that we've played with Grandma and Grandpa for as long as I can remember. Though they're 82 and 83 right now, it's still a game we can all enjoy together.

Games are still going on downstairs - I think dutch blitz is the current craze, but I decided to take a break from it all and get in a little post. This trip is going well. Soon I'm sure I'll get some more posts in detailing other awesome things going on. But for now, I just want to say Merry Christmas!

Church Christmas Party

Last night we had the adult Christmas party for our church. It's always been a fun party, and last night was no exception. After eating a wonderful dinner, we have what's become the traditional white elephant gift exchange. The 37 adults each drew numbers and the fun began. Some gifts were definitely of the white elephant variety (like the brick!), but others were gifts that many people wanted (like the nuts or flood lights). The most guarded gift was the duck! It actually was stolen by a very smooth move by Susie before the game was over! She did end up returning it since new house rules were created saying the the duck couldn't be stolen until it was frozen (stolen 3 times) or until the exchange was over. Mrs. Duck comes to almost every Christmas party as a gift and almost every year is kidnapped. Sometimes, like last year, it's even before the winner of the duck is able to bring it home.

This year the Morton's ended up with Mrs. Duck again. They got the duck in 2005 and I (through the help of my siblings) was able to ducknap it in 2006. After holding on to the duck for about a month, I sent ransom notes through the mail. When they never responded to my email contact (due to some email problems of their own), I eventually returned the duck with Easter candy (ducks and chicks and eggs and peeps) about a month later. It was fun to create and send the ransom notes, but I certainly found out that I don't like to be the one suspected of a "crime" like this. To this day, the Morton kids will often refer to me as ducknapper. Below are pictures of my ransom notes!