Well, we're home after two weeks of being in Colorado for the holidays and boy is it cold here in Iowa! At times it is -30 and our apartment is freezing! I thought Rexburg got cold, but this is really burrrrrrr!
We sure did have a PARTAY in Colorado. And by that, I mean that it consisted of eating a lot of food. (Not solely, but I DO love to eat...naturally.) We hit up Yakitori, Smash Burger, Qdoba, Wild Wings, Schlotzskys (twice), etc. etc. etc. Basically it was awesome!!! In between gorging ourselves on the delicacies of America's saturated fat warehouse, we played a lot of board games like scrabble, boggle, Rook (which the Ladies roundhouse kicked the boys on), and a bunch of other fun ones.
One of my favorite things we did one night was make a huge fire in the brick fireplace outside. We roasted a ton of marshmallows which meant a lot of s'mores. I don't think I've ever seen a kid (aka Claire) eat so many burnt marshmallows in one hour. She had those things cranking out of the fire and into her mouth like a shooting rocket.
Christmas eve was awesome! We had our usual almond in the pudding and clam chowder. Bradley got the almond in his pudding this year which meant he won the prize! It was a "Worst Case Scenario" board game, and holy moly is that a crazy game! I now know how to dismantle a caterpillar's head in case I need to eat it on a desert island. Man vs. Wild anyone? The pajama elf also made his usual rounds to our house and dropped off some warm and fuzzy sleeping duds. Anyways, one of the best parts of Christmas eve was that Matt called from Aussie land! He had a lot of good and funny things to say to us! Go Matt!
Christmas morning (drum roll, please) we all woke up at 4:30 in the morning! Yeah, it's a tradition at our house to go through stocking and present goodness in the dark morning hours. And we open presents one by one...youngest to oldest...
My head hurts just thinking about it now, but wow! And yawn!
We had such a nice Christmas! It was fun to see everyone open presents (especially Claire) because she still is in that believing state. I don't know how she's still doing it with all of us older kids around, but Santa still lives at my house people! One of my favorite gifts was the fullsized keyboard my parents got for us. I have really been wanting to play the piano and now both Bradley and I can! Everything thing we got was so nice and fun! Thanks a bunch!
New Years was a blast too. And guess what we did? Eat. The usual wantans and mountains of bubbly and chips and every horribly delicious and heart wrenching thing. Now we are back home after a terribly long drive. Our next task is to get our apartment up to a decent degree so we can ring in 2010 with some energy!
