Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

I realized I never said either of those things here. Seems like a blog requirement and I missed them both. Sorry!

Christmas was good. We had a nice, relaxing time with my brother's family. We have spent the past 2 Christmases at their house. His wife (who I call Martha despite the fact that it really irritates her) does a beautiful job of decorating. Next year we need to host the Christmas celebration. The bar has been set high for decorating!

I have an embarrassing confession to make: I brought the digital camera but never took a single picture of people. Instead, I photographed this:


If we are being honest, cookies are the highlight of Christmas in my family. I think the fact that I took pictures of the cookies rather than the kids is proof of that. In my defense though, when the kids are opening gifts I really love to watch and for me a camera gets in the way of watching.

When we returned home on Christmas Eve Anna began crying because her ear hurt. The short story is I took her to the emergency room at 3:30 Sunday morning because it hurt so bad she couldn't sleep. One of Anna's gifts was a child-sized Snuggie. She spent most of Christmas Day snuggled up in it.



Ethan received a red bathrobe. It is super, super soft. Ethan is extremely particular about his clothes - we have to cut labels out of almost everything because the labels irritate him, and he won't wear shirts that are screen printed because he finds them too uncomfortable. He LOVES his robe because it is about the softest thing on the planet. For some reason in this picture the color looks extremely pink. (Ethan is pretty unhappy about that fact.) And, for the record, he has had a haircut since this picture was taken. A long overdue haircut!



Wow! That hair was BAD!!

The other thing that happened over Christmas was we lost a pet. Ethan's fish jumped ship. Thankfully, he was not traumatized by the event. (Ethan, I mean. The fish was, obviously, extremely traumatized!) In fact to my great surprise Ethan thought it was funny to flush the fish. He called to Anna to come watch and they both thought it was funny. That was a big relief because I feared a scene like one in The Cosby Show many, many years ago where the flushing of the fish was a huge, solemn event.

I am very much looking forward to school resuming. It feels like I cannot go 30 seconds without hearing "Mama, can I..." Even now, it feels like I could write more colorfully and in more detail if only I didn't have to stop every 30 seconds. I am not kidding - this paragraph has already been interrupted 3 times.

With that, I'm giving up for now.