Where's Winter?

The first week of January was rather odd around here. On the first Saturday of the New Year, it was over 70 degrees!!! So, what do yo do when it's that nice? You go to the ocean, of course. We weren't the only ones with this idea, but we had a nice visit and then went out to dinner.

Of course, now winter has returned with a vengeance. It was 5 below this morning!

Merry Christmas!

Well, I fell off the blogging wagon, but I'm back and ready to roll!

Graham nicely provided us with a lovely bug from school two weeks before Christmas that had us all flat on our backs for a full week -- and then we just coughed our way into the New Year. It set back our grand plans of having all the shopping, baking and wrapping done before the weekend of Christmas! We got it done, but it wasn't pretty.

We went to a local tree farm to get our tree. Graham met a friend from school and played hide and go seek among the trees while we selected a nice tree. Emma made friends, too.

On Christmas Eve, our family lit the candles in the Advent Wreath at church. Graham got itchy, but wanted to stay for singing "Silent Night" by candlelight. So he and Chuck went to the nursery to play tic-tac-toe for a while, and then he got to hold his candle and sing "the most beautiful Christmas song".

We wrote a note to Santa that asked for a piece of coal because Graham wanted to know what it looked like (we'd been threatening that if he didn't calm down, Santa would put coal in his stocking). Santa wrote back that he didn't have any extra coal to give Graham because it was in high demand this year!

Gramma and Papa Houghton came over after their Christmas Eve service and were here in the morning for the chaos. Graham ripped through those presents!