A New Year, A Birthday, & A Broken Oven.

     Oh wow. I can't believe I've let myself get this behind on here. I feel like it's been ages since I last sat down to write anything. Let me catch you up on what's been going on around here since Christmas. First of all, I can't begin to tell you how wonderful Christmas was for me. I can't name anything extraordinary that I did, but I just know that I thoroughly enjoyed having all my kids home and being able to just spend time together as a family. My husband took the last two weeks of December and the first week of January off and spent the majority of that time in a deer stand. He also enjoys "running dogs" and my son made practically every step he made during those three weeks. The girls and I spent a nice, long day shopping with my Mom, sisters, niece, and cousins the Monday after Christmas. We found a lot of good deals and my oldest discovered the Ulta Store (mama mia!). A highlight of the day was taking the girls to the cutest self-serve yogurt shop and sampling everyone's yogurt creations.
     I'm so thankful my Aunt Nae was down visiting for the holidays too. She came over one day (out of the blue) and announced that she was going to help me get all my Christmas decorations put away. And, she did just that. She also helped my older children straighten up their rooms. She also cleaned the dust off my baseboards in the living room. Then, she went outside and helped us get rid of all those leaves that had fallen over the last two months. Hello? I couldn't believe what we managed to get accomplished in the seven hours she was here. I just kept telling her over and over, "I'd probably still be in my robe right now if you hadn't of showed up.". She laughed because she knew it was the truth.
     I was able to invite some dear friends over for New Year's Eve. Three of my friends that I started first grade with and their families. We ate lasagna, salad, french bread, jalapeno popper dip, chex mix, and brownie trifle and drank lots of sweet tea and Sprite. The food was pretty good, but oh how I enjoyed the company the most. We laughed about school memories we had and tried to catch up on fellow classmates that we had contact with. We talked about the Lord and how we were all incredibly thankful to serve such an awesome God. Some of us come from different denominational backgrounds and that's ok. We can all agree on the fundamentals of Christianity and that we are all part of the body of Christ. It was such good time of fellowship and I hope we can do it again and invite more classmates to join us.
     Last week, we had the unthinkable happen. Haha! We had a little snowstorm blow through our neck of the woods. It was mostly ice mixed with snow, but we made the most of it. The kids missed two days of school and I ate chili for about 72 hours straight (and chex mix!). My son and I share the same birthday and we got to celebrate our birthday on one of those snow days. That's him in the above picture. Isn't he a sweetie? He probably wouldn't appreciate me calling him that, but he doesn't read this blog anyway. I can't believe I'm inching closer to the big 40 with each passing year. Yikes! Well, I'm really good at not thinking about things like that, so I'm just going to push that thought to the back of my mind for now.
    Lastly, I've been kind of depressed about my oven that's been broken since Dec. 1. We had a pretty nasty thunderstorm move through our area the day before and I believe lightening came in on it. At any rate, it was very inconvenient not to have an oven during the time of the year when I do my most serious cooking and baking. I had to haul all my goods to different family members' homes to cook. And guess what? I'm still having to do it. I've had the repairman out 4 times and each time he leaves he tells me, "Well, I'm going to have to order another part and you know ma'am the part will probably be on backorder.". He's fastly becoming one of my least favorite people. Okay, I know I shouldn't blame him and take my frustrations out on him (and I don't...to his face). If I couldn't release this pent up frustration on him, then the next logical person would be my husband. Poor thing. Haha! I'm going to try to behave myself and be kind to everyone. Plus, a broken oven is so petty and just a glitch in the road. I have so much to be thankful for and there are so many people worse off than me that I'm going to try not to mention that silly oven again. I hope I've not bored you to tears, but there was so much to catch up on. I plan to have some new recipes up very soon. Have a great day!