Belated Greetings

And now, I present to you all a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year greeting!!  I'm not sure if it's super lame to send this out there after it's already the 3rd day of the new year, but I figured it couldn't hurt!  The past few weeks around here seem to have been busy, yet altogether lazy.   Our family is big on tradition when it comes to Christmas, so we would have fits of "traditional activities" that were strung together by countless holiday movies in front of the tv drinking hot cocoa!  We made traditional butter cookies (that I had to refrain from freaking out when sprinkles landed all over the table).  Made a gingerbread house that looked like it had melted in the Tropics.  I think we found and brought home every single Christmas book that the library had in the children's section!  And I was secretly counting down the days till Ava would head back to school...That's normal, right???  Then to top it all off, we had a lovely head cold sweep through the house just a week before Christmas, causing the blessed morning of Christmas to be filled with a symphony of coughing, sneezing, and all around hacking our heads off!  But it was lovely...

There is just nothing like spending Christmas and New Years with a 4 year old...and I can't think of a better place to celebrate all the winter-wonderland-ness than in frigid Alaska.  This is the first year that Ava totally got the "concept" of giving and getting presents.  We went to North Pole, Alaska to visit Santa...seriously the best, most amazingly genuine Santa I had ever seen!  I honest-to-goodness really thought he'd be flying to our house to deliver our presents cause we've been such good girls this year!  haha!  On New Year's Eve we headed out to our church potluck (those two words always go together, don't they?).  Since it was a balmy 15 outside, we set off fireworks in the parking lot at a strange 10:27pm (the natives were getting restless...ie, I was ready to head home)  But I was honestly blown away by these fireworks...and thers were not just skimpy bottle rockets..I'm talking, like...I was literally jumping up and down, clapping my hands, screaming and laughing because I was so impressed by these huge fireworks exploding right over my head!  I probably should have been embarassed by my behavior, but hey...how often does 2010 end, and 2011 begin?  There's a first time for everything!