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Thursday, January 10, 2019

Christmas in NJ

My sister got my mom the sock monkey hat

It was the first Christmas I spent with my sister in years! She happened to be home helping our parents this year instead of in North Dakota.

We had a ton of fun, despite the fact that I had gone all out on the llama theme this year before I realized my sister (who was traumatized by a llama as a small child) would be there. Oops.

And, speaking of traumatizing, the Emperor and I received matching inflatable T Rex costumes for Christmas!

Here we are, terrorizing my mom.

I know it just looks like she's taking pictures, and laughing hysterically, but I can only presume it's terrorized laughter!

My sister thinks this was the most bizarre Christmas present she'd ever seen, however I also received the following three items.

I'm not saying I didn't like and enjoy these items (I can't get enough of that mug!!), just that I'm not convinced the T Rex suit was the most bizarre.

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Wordless Wednesday: Smashing Gingerbread

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Christmas in Maryland

This was our house this Christmas.

When I started adding a penguin a year, I really thought we'd only get a year or two out of each penguin and we'd end up with about three at a time.

I have to admit, I love our nativity!

We rescued it when a church was throwing it away because it was damaged.

We learned to repair plaster and paint them!

Now I actually like ours better than our parish's set!

Theirs is quite lovely, but about half the size of ours, except the camel.

Our judgy camel is about 4 times the size of theirs, but 100% judgier...

We moved the creche from the traditional side platform to the center this year,and people loved it!

Also this year, Leena had the idea of doing window arrangements. They were a ton of work, but they really were beautiful, especially at the Christmas evening Masses when the candles were on.

And we accidentally got wreaths that were too large (the bows looked tiny), so we ended up using our extra berries and pine cones to decorate the wreaths.

Again, extra work, but the results were excellent: everything looked very coordinated!

Monday, January 7, 2019

Catching Up

I'm going to do a series of posts catching up on the last six weeks, but here's the short and (mostly) drama free version:

My Dad, who has had Parkinson's for nearly 30 years, got diagnosed with bone marrow cancer (MDS). This sounds terrible, but is actually fantastic news.

It turns out that much of the decline he's had over the past year is actually from not having enough blood cells, not really the Parkinson's, AND they can do many things to get his bone marrow producing cells again, AND the actual cancer is very slow and unlikely to be life limiting in his case. After a certain amount of anguish before we understood all this, we are very, very happy and relieved!

Also, my Dad is retiring at the end of this month, shortly before his 81st birthday!

I've been doing a lot of driving back and forth to NJ, and my sister is still there now, helping out while his bone marrow gets up and running again.

Oh yes, and there was Christmas! Christmas here, decorating the parish, Christmas in NJ, terrorizing my mother with dinosaurs and traumatizing my sister with llamas, and Christmas back in Maryland with family, friends, and weird frogs. We really needed all 12 days this year!

And today we are packing up Christmas at the parish and at home, and starting to think about what this new semester will look like. I've been working on new ways to organize schedules now that we have so many older kids going in so many directions.