The Days Before Christmas

Friday night waffles anyone? When we got back from Vespers, the house was a bit "hazy" and smelled accordingly. A quick survey of the kitchen revealed the cause - we had left a waffle baking the whole two hours we were gone! Not even the neighborhood scavengers carried this one away from our deck where it spent the next 24 hours.

After visiting awhile with Cristy, I enjoyed laying by the fire in the family room - till midnight if you can believe that! Yes, my eyes were even open.

Sabbath we enjoyed having 3 of our colleagues over for dinner, our librarian, new socials teacher who graduated from CA with Ryan, and our new Spanish teacher and his family.

It was fun having a 16 month old in the house Sabbath, little Noah - brought back memories of those demanding days gone by. David is our new Spanish teacher. Jeannie enjoys staying home with Noah.
Cristy was here with us for the last week. We hadn't seen her in 17 years since her family left Oshawa to move to Alberta, so it was fun getting to know her as an adult. She attended the Arise Institute in Troy, MI this fall and caught a ride down here to look over SAU before flying today to the Minneapolis GYC. She's so much like her mother, so we felt like Cheryl was here for a visit.

Last night Ryan, Randy and I opened Christmas gifts.

Ryan is leaving this afternoon with Carrie and Grant for her folks' place in NC. They'll catch up with us at Mom's in Florida on the 27th.

We'll be left behind with just the two of us here to finish up our grades before we leave Sunday for Florida.

Weekend Snaps

It shocked us to come home from church and have Ryan say to us, "before you take off your Sabbath clothes, let's take some pictures" and he had his camera in hand. It was always a struggle getting such pictures awhile back of Ryan who was the FIRST to be out of his Sabbath clothes. . . but it's nice having the pictures. Thanks, Ryan! I hope you don't mind my using them before you even got them posted, thanks to our wireless being down the last 3 days. A new router is on the shopping list it would seem.

in our back yard

While all you up north folks are bundling up, we are enjoying shirt sleeve weather and sunshine. I love Tennessee winters! This was taken December 1 and we had mid 60's. Mind you, it has gotten cooler since then - so we make use of jackets now and then.

It was nice having "our kids" home for Sabbath dinner. They went to 5 hours of marriage counseling sessions SAU had this weekend Fri. night and Sabbath afternoon. (About Carrie & Ryan - they really weren't sweetly hugging each other - it was a rare second in their after-dinner wrestling match, initiated by guess who?)

Randy relaxing after dinner before we went to hear Neal Nedley's excellent presentation.

Carrie and Ryan in front of the Christmas tree before she headed back to Highland Sunday