Fashionably Late

Well, the holidays have come and gone, but it really feels most appropriate to gather together as a family to build a gingerbread house. Don't you think? Yep, we have had this little gingerbread kit since Thanksgiving (thanks mom and dad) but didn't have the energy to break it out. Naturally, January 5th seemed like a good day to build it. It was the sloppiest job ever since we started at 7:20 and wanted the kids in bed by 8:00. We were almost successful...but Emma and I are reading a biography of Walt Disney right now so we couldn't stop ourselves from reading another chapter! We are more than half-way through the book and are excited to know more about Walter before we visit his World in February.

Of course, the benefit of building a gingerbread house after Christmas is that you get to eat it right away!!

We also had the opportunity to have our Christmas extended this year by having all of those snowstorms delay our packages until last week. It was so much fun to open more gifts and the generosity was overwhelming! Again, thank you all so much!!

THE WOUNDED SOLDIER

For those of you who don't know, Steve was burned on his ankle from an accident at work. Here is a picture of the wound shortly after it happened.

WARNING: Those with weak constitutions should not scroll down!!

It is looking much better now but should leave a mighty scar.

New Practice Name

As the new year approaches, my office name is changing! We are now "Northeast ENT and Allergy" and we have a website: www.northeastentallergy.com

If you are interested in checking out some info and photos, feel free to peruse this infant website (just went live yesterday!). My credentials are not accurate, since I won't complete my Au.D. until mid-February, but because the practice name changes tomorrow and new business cards/letterhead/forms were being printed by the thousands they opted to just put the Au.D. by my name.

Thanks to all of our loved ones!!

Dear family and friends,

Thank you all so much for your thoughtful and generous gifts-we have been spoiled rotten! We are just so grateful for so many thoughtful things (apparently we still have 3 packages coming in the mail, due to the rotten weather across the country!). What a lucky family!

Steve was so thoughtful for me this year. As this is our 10th Christmas, he gave me a beautiful new watch with diamonds in it! As I am sure you know, the modern day 10th anniversary is celebrated with diamonds. I, of course, was unaware of this tradition. I only hope he remembers this on June 18th......

I gave Steve a new suit that, of course, did not fit. I hope he enjoys taking it back and picking out one that he really loves! I picked this one because I loved the dark gray color and he looks really nice in that shade.

So again, thanks to everyone for making our Christmas so special! We are so grateful to you all and look forward to a wonderful 2009, especially because we have so many great things happening this year! We can't wait to see you all!

Love,
Mary

Ho Ho Ho

We hope you all had a great Christmas!

While we wish we could have been with all of our loved ones, we still enjoyed our morning together. Of course the kids could not stay in bed past 7:00 am.
Dallin's Santa Pile

Lauren's Santa Pile

Emma's Santa Pile

While Mom checked to see if Santa came, everyone waited at the top of the stairs.

Dallin cleaning up with his new vacuum.

Mom and Dad's gift to the kids....look at the treasure hunt!

Here we are getting ready to eat our traditional scones and Finnan Haddie...except that I had to modify the recipe. I bought regular haddock and just added

hickory smoke seasoning. It actually tasted delicious and the kids loved it.

Dinner may look like Deja Vu. Actually, we had planned to eat with friends but with their two sons with the stomach flu...well, you can guess. We elected to simply meet, swap food items, and enjoy a simple dinner at home. The food was DELICIOUS!

A Winter Wonderland

NOTE: The comments were written prior to uploading photos. Please disregard any comments regarding photos not being uploaded.....

First of all, sorry for the delay in the new post. My greatest apologies to Matt Dimock...you will probably find this one boring, too. You see, ever since I stopped spending 20 hours per week on the PC for school I have been boycotting even turning the beast on. I use the laptop for quick 10 or 15 minute checks of my email before darting off. My pictures all need to be downloaded to the PC for upload onto the Blog. Still, I am not marching all the way upstairs (it's like 15 steps!), waiting the 5 minutes for the dinosaur to turn on and missing out on quality holiday time. Yep, I couldn't be happier. I don't want to make any changes to the computer until I take my Comps in February...I would absolutely freak if I lost all of my files. Yes, I do keep backups, but I have an awesome system that would be seriously disrupted if the computer was replaced at this stage of the game.

At any rate, you deserve an update on our family's life. Listen to this soap opera script:

Thursday: Emma's Birthday party, I do have photos on the camera that can be uploaded later. Suffice it to say that we had a grand party, complete with "Pin the Nose on the Emma."

Friday: Disastrous ice storm, power outage, complete with loss of heating source...until I discovered that our gas fireplace actually works without electricity. That night we had the Petersons spend the night on our floor to keep toasty warm at 72 degrees compared to their house that was in the 40s! At one point, we had 16 people here and were awaiting the next 6 friends when the power came back on (this was after 2 days without power). I still can't believe that the Titus family braved the night at their home with temps outside in the single digits!
We finally had a movie party in the van on Saturday since the kids were feeling some cabin fever.

Saturday: We enjoyed the warmth of the fireplace and delicious food provided by the Titus' dutch oven! Wow, we need power outages more often to get that kind of gourmet!

A nice busy week followed by another weekend destroyed by showstopping snow!

Friday: Steve's work party was cancelled and he was able to attend my work party with me. The roads were pretty bad and it took us twice as long to get there. I don't know why, but we were the only car traveling southbound for miles! Maybe the other drivers knew something we didn't ..... By the way, I was crowned the "Cookie Queen" for the third straight year. No official contest this year because the ice storm made it almost impossible for all of the cookies to be completed on time but one of the physicians announced that he liked mine the best so I got to keep my title for yet another year! Woohoo! I wore my crown the rest of the night. Really, I did wear it for a few minutes just to rub it in.

Saturday and Sunday: The snow dumped, church was cancelled, and shovelling was a joy. I shoveled in the morning on Sunday for an hour, Jeff Titus snow-blowed at about noon, and Steve and I shoveled that night for another hour. Of course, life wouldn't be complete without another 45 minutes of shoveling this morning. Hooray! NOT! (I felt like adding a throw-back to the 90s). I had to work this morning and tomorrow, so that is just an added bonus.

So, here I am, baking bread at midnight to complete my coworkers' gifts. Yeah. I did actually bake 12 loaves on Friday for the party but it seemed too overwhelming to carry them out of the house and into the restaurant during a white-out. I'm paying for that choice today. Only 4 more to go!

Okay, I'm going to sign off since I have a bit of a headache and I am sure that I have made more than my fair share of grammatical errors. Please cut me some slack....it would certainly be in the holiday spirit!