We traveled to Ohio for the Christmas holiday. We drove up the evening of the 22nd. The drive just seems to get more and more brutal each time. Eight hours, at night, with three dogs? Bru-tal! And once you pass Cincinnati, there is pretty much nothing until you get to Toledo. So you're tired and cranky, and sick of everything that is on the radio already, and you still have 3 more hours to go. Arrgh!
Of course, somehow on the 23rd we managed to rally and head to IKEA!
Until we get one close to Nashville, it will never cease to be exciting to me! I don't even remember what all we bought. Not much. Some flowerpots, frames and little things like that. We were going to get new couch and ottoman covers, but we backed out at the last minute (Josh wanted red and I wanted grey). Good thing we chose not to purchase them (over a $300 purchase for the colors I wanted and we've had some car repairs to take care of since then).
Christmas was good. Went to Mom's church, which always has a great Christmas service, even though I am not particularly a church person.
My sister made these lovely cookies:
Pablo greatly enjoyed all the fat squirrels up north and tried to climb my mom's trees in hopes of getting them.
We drank a lot of Tim Horton's Iced Capps (and ate a lot of sandwiches, bagels and donut holes there, too):
Oh, how I wish we had a Tim's down here!
My Dad got a giant sock monkey:
It will look nice under his sock monkey tree:
I got a record player, which I am really excited about. It was fun to drag out my old records from the garage and give them a listen this past weekend. Josh got a kindle, which he really loves, and we also got a convection oven that he is really loving and using for everything - even toast! I haven't quite mastered it yet.
Once we came back to Nashville, we had two more Christmases. The first was with Josh's mom. She always buys us Christmas jammies and it's a lot of fun. See?
I love my sweet seester-in-law:
And my precious brother-in-law, too. Soglad they came in from Colorado!
The next day (or maybe 2 days after that, I can't remember), we hosted another Christmas at our little house, this time with his dad and siblings (I haven't uploaded the photos yet). I was really proud of myself because I actually DELEGATED for once in my life. Usually when I host something, I am all about making it as complicated as possible and doing it all myself. Not this time. I went with easy recipes (a cilantro-ranch-jalapeno dip, cream cheese chicken cili in the crockpot and hot chocolate also in the crockpot), and I asked Josh's dad to bring the rice to put the chili over and the garlic bread, and his siblings to bring wine. It all turned out great and was pretty low stress! I didn't even bust out the cloth napkins.
I hope everyone had wonderful holidays and may you have a wonderful 2012!
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