Our Christmas...and a little more

Happy January!

I have been bad again about blogging. With the Christmas preparation and some unforeseen events, I didn't get to write as I had hoped in the month of December. Here's a brief recap:

The kids had a good time getting ready for Christmas. We decorated the house, visited Santa at the mall (and at church and Nicholas' class party), made and decorated gingerbread men, and celebrated the birth of Jesus on Christmas Eve at church. The bell choir rang at this service too. Of course, there was the usual wrapping of gifts, mailing of cards, baking cookies and making candy.

Mike and I had the privilege of having to drive back and forth to St. Albans (just west of Charleston and about an hour drive one way) 3 times in one week....if memory serves. His truck needed some work and the only place we could take it was the "local" Nissan dealer. One of those trips was to get the truck back only to find out that the keys and invoice were locked in the garage and no one had access to it after hours. Boy were we upset!

The weekend before Christmas we had a huge snow storm that dropped about a foot of heavy wet snow on us. Saturday at 3am I woke to find we had no electric. At our house that means no phone either. Mike hooked up the small generator that we have and we were able to run a space heater on low and the refrigerator. However, as we were getting ready for bed Saturday night, Mike shorted the circuit and the computer in the refrigerator took the hit. Oh yeah, forgot to mention that we only have electric heat here! Sunday morning we woke up to a VERY cold house. Mike had to go into work - I packed the kids and I up to head out.....without a destination. We ended up in South Charleston at the hotel for 2 days. This was very trying as I knew that I still needed to wrap most of our gifts and bake several batches of cookies and make all of my candy, not to mention that I had the daunting task of keeping two active kids occupied in a hotel room. Luckily, Mike called Tuesday morning from the house; he had stopped to check on his way to work. We were headed home!

Christmas Day was spent at our house. Saturday we went to Bridgeport to have Christmas with Grandma and Papaw Bramer. Sunday we were in Fairmont to celebrate with Pappa Francis, Jennifer and her girls. We had a really nice weekend in both places. Everyone enjoyed the kids!

New Year's Eve we had a "party" at home. The kids kept Mike and I entertained until midnight. I let them stay up to see the new year in. Then I think we were all in bed by 12:20!