2008 Happy New Year

Christmas went well. However, it was very crazy with 22 people in the house Christmas day. Quinn got his "gorilla toy" as he calls it from Santa. For the past month he had been asking for this gorilla toy for Christmas, so we had Quinn write a letter to Santa asking for the toy. Ava got a play kitchen, which she likes to play with. Matt had fun spending 3 hours putting it together Christmas eve after the kids went to bed.

We had a white Christmas this year. We didn't wake up to snow, but at about 2:00 in the afternoon it started snowing and we had light dusting of snow on the ground. A couple days after Christmas we took the children to the mountains to got play and sled in the snow. Quinn loved it, Ava hated it until we got her in the sled and then she didn't want to stop.

does this look like a girl in pain?

The next day we took the kids to the children's museum, where Matt sat on Christina's foot and broke her toe. Matt was sitting on a chair shaped like an upside down U. The sides were solid and he tried to adjust it and accidentally slid the chair over on top of Christina's toe while sitting on it. Christina wanted to throw up due to the pain. They had to wheelchair her to a security vehicle and they drive her to our vehicle. The guy who drove us told us that it could have been worse and told us about an incident the day before where a father and his 7 year old daughter were ice skating; she fell in front of him and he ran over her hand cutting one of her fingers off.

For New Years we went on the parents boat and watched the Space Needle Show, which was quite a disappointment due to technical difficulties. They said that the computer software was corrupted, which caused the fireworks to stop twice before they let them off manually. While everyone was outside watching the fireworks Annie the dog was inside left unattended. She was in doggy paradise for the 10 minutes we were outside. She helped herself to the food that was left out, which included two whole sides of smoked salmon, one of which was Cajun smoked, also about a dozen bacon wraps including the toothpicks which held them together, and she finished off the remainder of the baked brie. She did however leave the vegetable platter alone, go figure. This is a dog who usually throws up people food, because she cant handle it, so there was lots of concern of her throwing up all over the boat, along with a dozen toothpicks in her intestines. We spent the night on the boat and she slept in the shower that night. Amazingly she never had any problems digesting the food.

Most of us are getting over being sick. Christina had the flu for a couple days, Ava has a cold, Matt had a sore throat and as far as we could tell Quinn was fine. Were all just trying to recover from the Holidays and put the house back in order.

Here is Ava's other Christmas dress.

We also built gingerbread houses. Actually they were gramcracker houses, except for Tawsha's on the far left she used a gingerbread kit from Costco.