Holiday Wrap Up

This year the Holidays were a bit different for our family and with the craziness of our schedules, sadly not many pictures were taken and those that were are not great. So my final post for the 2011 blog will be written post so I can finally wrap up the year and get on with 2012.

So to start about mid December....my birthday was on Dec 20th. I turned 39. 39! Where did that come from? I don't feel 39! Hopefully I don't look 39. Anyways, I am a believer in milking my birthday to the fullest. I spent the early part of the day with Jared at his preschool Christmas party. We made gingerbread houses, played with play dough, made a Santa puppet and watched the kids perform favorite Christmas songs. It was a fun was to spend an afternoon. My baby will enter Kindergarten next year, so I'm trying to soak up every little experience I can with him.

That night Joe spoiled me as usual. He took me to a favorite restaurant, Brio, where we enjoyed delicious Italian bistro food. This is a special treat because this is not a cheap place. Afterwards we went shopping for my birthday present. I got my iPhone 4s. So fun! It is amazing what can be accomplished by such a small device. I never would have imagined in my lifetime to see such developments. I think back to the early 90's when the Internet was this new and kinda scary endeavor and now I carry Internet with me everywhere I go. Amazing!

I continued the birthday celebrations into next week with a night out with great friends. Dinner and great conversation are always a pick me up. Thank you Aimee Asay, Nicki Enos, Laura Flores and April Corey for taking some time to celebrate with me.

My work schedule was an added change this year for the Holidays. I currently work Wednesday through Saturday on the 4pm to 2am shift. That meant I worked on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve this year. Both weekends were very busy and crazy at work. Both were learning weekends. I never knew how crazy Mesa can get!

For our family Christmas celebrations....we got together with my family at Grandma and Papa's for a Christmas Eve lunch (because of my schedule, but it worked out great). After lunch we opened presents from cousins and grandparents. On Christmas day, which was on Sunday this year, we attended our shortened ward services where I sang in the choir. That meant we had to delay the opening of presents for our boys until after church. The boys were really great about it and very patient in their waiting. Each boy got something they really wanted. Jacob got an automatic air soft gun, Tyler tons of Beyblades, Aaron a new bike and Jared power rangers. Joe got some books he had been wanting along with a gun safe. I got an iPad and accessories for work and play. We all were very blessed this year.

Later that night we went back to Grandma and Papa's to have dinner with them and Galen's family. It was Galen's year to have the kids for Christmas and it was fun to have them all together. Julia's son Sheldon was the only member missing this year.

Another big and exciting, though not in a good way, thing that happened and another reason why I don't have pictures for this post...is our computer contracted a nasty virus and it is kaput. We extracted all the information we could from it and then it took it's last breath and died. Luckily we didn't lose too much, only a bit of financial records that we kept for 2011. Not a big deal because most of that is online and in the past anyways, but I liked to make reports for our taxes from those records. Just a hiccup, not a big deal. But then I realized we forgot to copy off all our emails and email contacts. Years worth of email contacts. It is almost all recovered now thanks to all our family and friends taking time to send test emails to us so we can update the new programs. I think of it now as an early spring cleaning. A forced spring cleaning. Much needed.

So there you have it...a quick overview of our Holidays. Now time to move into the New Year!