New Year's Adventures and My Latest Ramblings

We ventured down to Utah to spend New Year's with my family. We did manage to stay up until midnight, which we don't normally do on New Years Eve. Call us boring, but we like our sleep and we know the New Year will still be around when we wake up in the morning :)

We played Bananagrams and watched TV to keep us awake. Somewhere in the mix of everything I used all of the bananagram tiles using only words relating to animals...some are a stretch.

On Friday we scheduled the church and had a friendly game of half-court basketball while the kids ran around the other half of the gym. I am not normally good at basketball, but I did a lot better than I thought I would (or could).

One time while Jonathan and I were dating or maybe engaged we got together with his family to play basketball. For the life of me I could not make a basket--I've never been good at shooting under pressure. I'm sure I looked like an uncoordinated fool out there. I so wanted to look athletic and talented, like the majority of his family is with basketball. I would have been just fine running back and forth guarding someone. Maybe then my lack of skill would have gone unnoticed, but they kept passing the ball to me! They were all trying to be fair--in fact I clearly remember Jonathan telling me, "They're not going to stop passing you the ball until you make at least one basket." Yeah, no pressure.

It all worked out and they still accepted me even though I was apparently lacking in basketball skills. The point of that whole story is that I wish I would have been able to play basketball then like I did this last weekend. Not that it matters, but it would have saved some humiliation on my part. And just for the record, I'm not asking for a rematch.

After playing at the church we all had supper (or dinner as most people call it) at my parent's house. Then everyone went their separate ways.

On Saturday we were able to meet Jonathan's family for our neice Halle's baptism. It was a really special day. It's been a long time since I've been to a baptism and we were glad we were able to make it.

We were finally able to give the last of our Christmas presents away.

I didn't want to post these pictures until after the gift was received. This is a baby quilt I made for our sister-in-law Kris. She is due in February. I look for any excuse to make a quilt. :)

My parents put sunflower seeds and millet on the outside ledge of their kitchen window. The birds come right up to the window to eat. They've done this as long as I can remember and I have a lot of childhood memories watching the birds and getting excited when a new species would make an appearance. So it's no surprise that Maggie enjoyed watching the birds too. She'd get a little too excited and scare them all away though.

And finally, this has nothing to do with anything really, but it is kind of funny. I bought a cookie press before Christmas because I have always wanted to be able to make cute little spritz cookies. You know the kind you get in the tin canisters? Anyway, I used it once and it broke. It had a guarantee so I wrote the company and had them send me a new one. When the new one arrived, I opened the padded envelope and lo and behold it was broken too. Now I've decided cute little spritz cookies aren't worth it. Obviously the part has an engineering flaw and will continue to break. Oh well.