Post-Christmas Holidays

Last Sunday was a big day for my boys: Bentley was ordained to the office of a priest in the Aaronic priesthood, and Ryder was made a deacon!  This means that Bentley can now bless the sacrament each week (he'll do it next week for the first time), and Ryder got to pass the sacrament to members of the congregation today!  He also gave a really good talk, so I got to sit and be extremely proud of him.  So it's all been very exciting (and a little scary) for them!

And then once that was all done, we hopped in the car and drove to Grandma and Grandpa's for the day!  They'd been in Houston for Christmas this year, so we exchanged Christmas presents and had dinner together and just enjoyed catching up!

The kids were, of course, very excited to have another present to open.  And we were excited to give Tom and Donna this amazing doughnut blanket!

It was such a beautifully warm day we didn't even wear coats the whole day.  So, naturally, we woke up the next morning to this:

Half our ward lost power for DAYS.  My friend just got his power back on late last night (he's lucky because he has a generator so he was okay).  We were lucky and didn't suffer more than a couple flickers.  (The neighborhood speculation is that our close proximity to the jail works in our favor here! 😂)  Still, I think we may need to invest in a generator, too.  If we lost power for days we would die.

The kids were thrilled, of course.  They didn't go back to school at all this whole last week.  It's looking like they'll finally go tomorrow.  So they got a three-week Christmas break!  How fun is that???

Craig and I used the extra time to start working on this puzzle that Natalie got us for Christmas:

It's our family picture from Sunriver!  Unfortunately, we got all the fun stuff done, and now we have that wretched black border to work on...

Anyway, I love December and all the craziness of Christmas, but I've started to also really love January and the chance to hunker down a bit and just stay inside by the fire.  I got a LOT of that this week and it was lovely.  It's so nice when you can actually find the beauty in each stage of life...