And so this was Christmas

I hope each and every one of you had a nice holiday, filled with joy, relaxation, and good food!

A few days before...Ben and his best buddy playing XBox

A vintage stocking I repaired

My initials on some beautiful laundry tape I found on eBay and ordered from France; it arrived on Christmas eve.

Using the good stuff

The second table, which inadvertently became "the kid's table"

I don't remember what I was talking about!  (With Rebecca at dinner...)

Okay, admit it: you've taken photos with your own feet in them!

Dennis gets a gift

The boys on Christmas morning, playing with their gadgets

It seems like every photo of my son these days looks like this!

This year, we all got iPhones (back in mid-October) and agreed that would be our Christmas splurge.  So, although we've had our "gifts" for a couple of months now, we're all still novices at using them.  (Well, except for Ben, who is applying his iPod Touch knowledge to the phone...)  I haven't had time yet to fully explore all that the phone has to offer, but I'm working on it!

As you know from earlier blog posts, we're in trying financial times right now with my husband's new job paying less (but being a better fit for him.)  Therefore, Christmas was quite lean this year.  I very much enjoyed this approach.  I plan to keep spending down and frugality up during all of 2012 and beyond, as my son's college years quickly approach!

 

We got the biggest snow of the year yet a couple of days before Christmas; it wreaked havoc for those last minute shoppers -- and I was glad that didn't include me!  Here's a view of America's Mountain (as we like to call Pike's Peak) as we were leaving a restaurant after breakfast last Friday.

Me shoveling the driveway, later that same day!

The hot chocolate that we never got around to serving on Christmas Eve; other things we didn't get around to doing included showing the year-in-review slideshow I made for the digital picture frame, singing the Christmas song Ben practiced on his guitar for a sing-a-long, and eating the Dreyer's peppermint ice cream!

I'm in a post-holiday, mellow kind of slump right now, how about you? 

I will now get off the computer and go to swim some laps, as the slump has included fewer trips to the gym and that is Not Good!

Yessiree, any minute now I'm going to get off the computer and go exercise...