Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. We arrived in Boise on Friday night after a relatively painless flight - far less painless than actually getting to the Los Angeles Airport at 4:30 p.m. during rush hour on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. The trip has gone by fast but we feel pretty accomplished in all we have managed to do since we got here. Saturday morning we finished up the last of our Christmas shopping, ate lunch at the Noodle Dump (endearing term for Don's family's favorite Chinese Restaurant), and had a fun one night gaming session at Angie's place (Don's sister) with her boyfriend and some friends. They were a great bunch and we had a lot of fun despite keeping some of us up slightly passed our bed time to finish the session.

Sunday was our official unofficial Christmas day. After sleeping in, we all got ready and headed over to Grandma and Grandpa's house to open presents and enjoy a fabulous turkey dinner which had been roasting in the oven since midnight. The evening's events also included a couple of rounds of the game Apples to Apples until the Boise State Football game which started off terrible, came all the way back to tie with one minute to go, only to get beat by a winning field goal in the final seconds of the game.

Sunday morning we met up with Don's good friend Adam from high school and his VERY pregnant wife Julia. They are due in the next couple of weeks and very excited for the big change their life is about to take with the birth of their first child. We wish them all the best and are very excited for them. We had a very nice breakfast at a place called Capri's and then were off to rescue Mom from boredom and get her out of the house. We actually decided to brave the mall because Don wanted to get his ring sized. I got him a wedding ring for Christmas and his mom also gave him her old band which works well as a men's ring too. So now instead of having no wedding rings (since he lost his first one) he has two! He is REALLY married now.

Monday night was Christmas eve and time for the annual holiday gathering of extended family. It's my fourth time now attending one of these holiday gatherings and I finally have all of the names and family tree connections down. There have been some difficult times of late with some major injuries and illness in the family so it was a very low key evening. But it was nice to be able to just get together and focus on being together rather than somebody having to organize a major dinner party or big gift exchange. Everybody brought what they could, an appetizer or some sweets, a friend of the family helped out with the main dish and we all had some food and drinks and caught up on each other's lives. And there was good news too. Don's cousin announced that she is newly pregnant and expecting their second child in about 7-8 months. Congratulations! Which of course lead to us getting inundated with questions about when we were going to produce offspring so we got to make our own announcement that we are NOT pregnant and NOT trying and that everyone better just take care of their health so they will be around to enjoy it when we are good and ready to get around to it.

It's Tuesday morning now and we are getting ready to leave to the airport in a little bit. When we get home Kristy will pick us up from the airport and we will get to spend the rest of the week with her until New Years when she flies back. So the holiday will continue and apparently I have been on the computer longer than I thought and now have to rush to get ready in time to catch our flight. Merry Christmas everyone.