The Holidays

Only a month and a half late, not to shabby!  Christmas was pretty good.  We got a real tree this year.  It was nice and fun but I'm not sure we will ever do it again because it was so darn messy..... But we had to do it because my regular tree wouldn't have fit in Callie and Brian's basement.  It was too tall :-(  Still we did the standard Christmas Eve stuff.  Read the Christmas story from the Bible.  Watched a Christmas movie with the kids, made cookies for Santa, etc.  Then Alan and I watched White Christmas while we "waited for Santa".  In the morning, Kimberly and Zachary wouldn't wake up, as usual.  We had to turn on all the lights and make a  bunch of noise for about half an hour before we finally just went in and woke Zachary  up.  Santa brought Kimberly some boots, Benjamin a baseball bat, glove and balls, Zachary got an elaborate Thomas the Train set and Nicholas got a rocking horse that lights up and plays music.  I got a new temple dress (yay!) and Alan got a baseball glove so he could play with Benjamin.  We had a big breakfast as usual and then spent the afternoon at Dave & Louise's house with all the cousins.  It was a pretty nice day.

For New Years we went down to see Jason and Jared & Families.  We started the afternoon on New Year's Eve at Jared's so the kids could play.  Then we all went to Jason's to hang out for the night.  We actually stayed the night.  The evening itself was pretty anti-climactic.  Ate too much and played some games and mostly refereed a thousand kids.  But the next day was when the real festivity started.  Alan has always wanted to deep fry a turkey, an activity that has been banned from Callie's yard (which I don't blame her for because I was a little worried at first too).  So Alan and Jason made careful plans and watched a bunch of different You Tube videos about how to and how not to deep fry a turkey.  So that is what they spent the morning doing.  And it was well worth it because that was the yummiest turkey I have ever had! Super juicy! It wasn't so scary after they got started.  Obviously nothing burnt down, and nobody burned a hand off or scorched their eyebrows off.

I was going to do a separate post about what has happened over the last 5 or 6 weeks, but lets be honest.  I probably won't get to it until April, so I'll just do it now.  January has been a whole lot of nothing.  Sitting around in the basement and watching too much TV.  Alan is on the computer for most of every day looking for jobs.  He has had a good amount of interviews but nothing that looks super promising as far as a job offer goes yet.  The process of getting a job is just so slow when it isn't entry level. On the plus side, we have both had lots of time to go to the temple and have been going weekly for the most part.  I have also started selling my plasma for some extra $$, which makes us sound super desperate.  We aren't that broke yet, we just feel a little guilty that we spent money we can't replace going on a trip to Disneyland with Jason's family last week.  I've been wanting to go pretty bad and since Alan will probably never get to do a vacation like that with one of his brothers again, we threw caution to the wind.  It was good for us to get out and go to the happiest place on earth. I have been very sick (you know the head kind) and this whole situation we are in has been really hard on everybody this time around.  I'm glad we went, but I have to do something to try and replace the money we blew.  And since tax season is upon us, and we are going to get hammered this year, every little bit helps..... right?