Dear Santa,

I just had to tell you a little bit about how Christmas went after you left on Christmas Eve. The girls enjoyed running into the living room and seeing everything sparkling and lit up, and hearing the Christmas music you left playing softly. The girls were so overwhelmed I don’t think they knew where to start.

Grace though, noticed that the cookies were almost all gone. Kudos on leaving one cookie with a big bite out of it. And what a sweet gesture to leave a note thanking the girls for the cookies, milk and reindeer snacks (carrots and celery). It was especially nice of you to remind them that you start checking your list for next year really early so that it’s never too early to think about being on the nice list.

I hope that you were able to make it home in record time and are now enjoying some nice R&R on some sunny beach somewhere. Though please remember the sunscreen, you are pretty pale.

We managed to make it through the morning with only minimal delays due to “Some assembly required” and had a wonderful breakfast with eggs, turkey bacon and cinnamon rolls. A Christmas miracle happened when I closed my eyes and realized that I had not bought any orange juice, since we don’t typically drink juice. All of a sudden, all I wanted in the world (aside from an end to world hunger and a million dollars) was a glass of cold calcium-fortified orange juice. As if an angel tapped my forehead with his/her wand I remembered that I had a half a can of frozen orange juice concentrate in the freezer that we keep for smoothies. I swear I heard your sleigh bells ring in that moment, and we had a wonderful breakfast indeed.

After a relaxing (?) day playing with pet shop toys and little people and eating too many cookies, I made my first ever Rib-eye roast for dinner instead of turkey or ham. I tell you what, I just get tired of turkey and ham. Even though I feel like I finally know the turkey secret enough to look forward to it once a year, It was nice to do something different for Christmas. We had rib-eye roast, au gratin potatoes (from a box.. Yes, I actually like them from the box better than homemade) and fresh green beans. It was a very simple meal. I even happened to have a jar of horseradish in the cupboard for Chris, who loves it with beef. It has officially been deemed our new Christmas day tradition.

In any case thank you for helping us to make the day so wonderful and I wish you a very Happy New Year. Oh, and I won’t tell Mrs. Claus that you ate 3 cookies aside from the one you took a bite out of. That will be our secret. Shh!

Sincerely,

Amanda

So we’ve had a bit of excitement this past week and while it’s all been resolved mostly, it’s left us $1500 poorer and 150% more thankful than we were last week.

Woody became ill on Thursday night, showing that he was in a great deal of pain whenever he’d try to go to the bathroom. Urinary problems are common in cats, especially male cats, as they get older. So we confined him to the bathroom and decided to take him to a vet first thing Friday am. The next morning, by the time we got him to the vet he was vomiting everywhere and yowling from the huge amount of pain he was in. Basically, his urethra had two blockages and his bladder was overflowing into his kidneys. He stayed overnight and on Saturday came home very out of it and just wanted some space.

By Sunday night however, he was back up on the bed with us, trying to play fetch and we knew he was feeling better. We got some lab reports back that there was no permanent damage to his kidneys and as far as they could tell.. as long as we changed his diet and put him on some medication there should be no reason for this to happen again. It was really scary though, especially hearing that he could have easily died from this. We already lost Coco last year and we’re just not ready to go through that again. Hopefully he’ll be healthy for awhile.

Anyway, now that this has been resolved we’re finally back on the holiday hayride and have gone to buy a tree. We actually had an artificial tree that is several years old. But half the lights were out and we couldn’t seem to fix it. New lights kept shorting out and eventually, more lights went out. So because we couldn’t see asking someone to pay for the tree with half it’s lights out, we decided to give it away. This also serves the storage function in that now we don’t have to struggle to find room to put it away again. We did that this weekend. Unfortunately, we couldn’t make it to buy a tree until today. We scored though, in finding some great choices for trees all half off. So we got a great tree that was marked $46 for $25. I found out that Chris has never had a real tree! That’s amazing to me. Part of our tradition when we were little was going to get our tree. I don’t remember many specifics, but more like feelings.. emotions.. and the smell of pine of course. It’s definitely a prominent memory. I’m glad that we did that with Grace today. She really enjoyed it. She quickly declared every tree to be “bigger than our house”.. pretty sad huh?

So we’ve got some lights up on the tree but it is slightly bigger than we were planning so now we actually need another strand of lights! Now I just have to see if the girls will let me keep Chrisome ornaments on this tree.

So tomorrow is Christmas eve and we do have a little shopping to finish up.. some for dinner tomorrow night and Christmas day and for Chris. but I’m excited. This will be our first Christmas with either of the girls alone. Not that we don’t appreciate our family and we certainly DO miss the heck out of everyone, but I’m going to enjoy it just being us and being able to take pictures and just be with them. I can’t wait.