New Year

After a super charged end of the year and having the whole family here everyday for about 2 weeks, the new year has been very quiet. Mark is back in Boston, Drew is in Qatar, the kids are in school, so our days are back to the mundane. Winter doldrums have set in. Time to get motivated and productive!

Family Game Night

It has been so great living near our son and his family. With our other son also home for the holidays, it just doesn't get better than that. Both of them will be leaving on Sunday, so last night was game night at our house. It was a chance for us all to have some fun times together since it might be another year before we can all get together again. We had the board game Risk going while Grandpa and Hannah played some chess and then the keyboard. We also played a couple of rounds of dominoes.
While it was warm and cozy inside, outside it was cold (20's) and snowing.

Post Christmas

Mark did get in the day after he was scheduled to arrived and so we had the whole family together for Christmas. We had 19 people at Christmas dinner which was hosted by our daughter-in-law's parents. A great time was had by all. On Monday we are headed back to Woodinville for a wedding. We haven't been back since we moved in October. Don't know yet if we'll drive by our house - we'll see.

Christmas Time

Well, Christmas is almost here. All that is lacking is Mark. We was to have arrived yesterday, but the last leg of his flight couldn't make it due to heavy fog, so he was to stay the night in Seattle. He's trying to get another flight out today, but it is still foggy, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens.
Since I last posted, we have gotten word that Drew will be deployed to Qatar in early January. So glad we are here near his family while he is gone.
Merry Christmas to all of you!!

December Already??

It's December already?? We whizzed right by Thanksgiving without even taking any pictures. We had a great time with our family and even our daughter-in-law's parents joined us.
Soon we are off on our big family cruise. It had been so cold here that will be nice to get into the warm waters of Mexico. We'll have to get some pictures on this trip. I'll post them when we return......

Wreath Making

When our boys were young, we had a family tradition of making Christmas wreathes from the abundant evergreen boughs in our area. Now that we are in an area almost devoid of evergreen trees but very well supplied with grapevines, we decided to take a class on how to make wreathes from grapevines. We really enjoyed it and this will now be a new tradition for us. Here's the first one we made ourselves! We made several more and they just got better each time. The best part of these grapevine wreathes is that they last from year to year - the evergreen ones dried up and had to be made new every year. We also like that the vine wreathes can be used for several different seasonal events, depending on how they are decorated.

Halloween

Last night we celebrated our first Halloween with our grandchildren. They came with their cousins and we grabbed a quick picture. Of course, I had to get dressed up in my costume, too. I made this years ago when Mark was in second grade and also made a matching one for him. Maybe next year, I can get one the children to wear it.