Happy New Year!

2008. Wow. Doesn't it seem like the Millennium was yesterday? But time moves on and we are looking forward to good things in the coming year. Tom will retire from the military at the beginning of November and we will move closer to our families. We will have to decide what we want to do in the "Real World." We'll buy another house, find new jobs...scary stuff--and I can't wait! Tom and I both feel the need to spend more time with our extended families and I really want to see the grandkids, too. Poor Jen and Jay must be so eager for us to have our own place up North, so that they can have their home to themselves at the holidays!

Anyway, Christmas was wonderful. We drove up the Saturday before and stayed with Jen and Jay. T.J. had arranged with them that he would come on Christmas Eve after he got off work in the early morning so that he could give the kids their Christmas presents and spend some time with them before catching his plane to Utah and Jodi. It was really nice to have that time, and the kids loved getting presents. Tom and I drove T.J. to the airport, stopped at the grocery store for a few necessities, than back to Jen and Jay's with the steamed shrimp we bought for dinner on a whim because it smelled so good!

Christmas morning, the little ones slept later than we expected. At about 8:00am, Tom and I started hearing people upstairs. Ryan sometimes likes to wake us up, but by 8:15 we decided we'd better get ourselves up there or we would either miss or delay the fun. As we were dressing, Ryan opened the door--he was disappointed to see us both up, and told us to get back in bed and he would come back and wake us up! We were 'wakened' with a kiss each and allowed to finish dressing before rushing upstairs for present opening. Funny that the gift that got the best reaction from Ryan was Sesame Street fizzing bath color tabs. He immediately ran up the stairs claiming he wanted a bath! Lily seemed to enjoy the unwrapping as much as the gifts themselves. It seemed like every shred of wrapping paper had to be removed before she could focus on the gift inside. Zach, being nine, was much quicker about opening his gifts. He found several he sat back and enjoyed before moving on.

Blogger is being weird and not allwoing me to add photos right now. I'll try again later.

Closing for now. Hope to add more later. Again, Happy New Year, Y'all!