The Bunch Celebrate Christmas and the New Year

Merry Christmas!

Christmas has once again come and gone. We all enjoyed it so much. Everything was kept low key and we just had a wonderful time visiting with our families. We hosted my husband's family on the 24th for a yummy mexican dinner, which consisted of us just picking it up from the local restaurant since we were trying to keep everything as easy and stress free as possible. We played games, laughed together, and basically just really enjoyed our evening together. Later that night, of course, Santa came to visit and left the kids their annual clue hunt to find their gifts. I made the kids stay in bed until 6:30 am and then they were allowed to come out and open presents. Afterwards we went to my parents house for a yummy breakfast. Our Christmas couldn't have been better (except maybe having some members who weren't able to come be there). We enjoyed a nice relaxing holiday weekend, which was good because the next weekend was going to be rough.

They really are crazy about the Greatest Showman.

Surprisingly, they did not get one shirt that was the same.

His comment was "they got old."

Anxiously, awaiting opening gifts.

We had so much fun!

T trying to figure out the first clue.

L reading her first clue.

Maisy is a great helper

A found her second clue.

Celebrating with our daughter/granddaughter in law.

T was Christmas festive by wearing his necklace.

Yummy breakfast of sausages, eggs, and breads.

It was a good day.

It hasn't rained in awhile. MOST of our yard is crunchy and very dry. However, the horse pen is completely muddy. I am talking standing water and large animals sliding about. We can only assume the pipe that takes our gray water to the sprinkler head was cracked or the horses crushed it. Either way it needed to be moved from their pen. The actual moving of the sprinkler head was pretty easy and inexpensive, HOWEVER, trying to find a 3/4 inch pipe 18 inches in the ground over about 1/2 an acre was NOT fun. In fact we have changed the expression from trying to find a needle in a haystack to trying to find a PVC pipe in the yard! We ,(I mean my husband) basically had to dig up the entire length in order to follow where it was going. It was NOT laid straight as we were previously told. It was really hard to dig so deep because it was SO muddy and we just kept sinking in and sliding, but we did finally finish. My husband was so tired after two days of digging that we stopped after just getting halfway from where we originally wanted it. It was 7 ft more than the minimum required by law so we were good. They are working perfectly now and the horse pen is down to just super muddy with no standing water. It will probably take a week to completely dry out. We, however, may need more time to rest! It was a lot of hard work and we are happy we are done with it, except for disassembling the head in the horse pen.
This next weekend will be all about relaxing and having fun. We have tickets to go see an Elvis impersonator and should have a good time. My son is super excited to go. He loves Elvis. Happy New Year's everyone!

T asked for glass coke bottles from Santa and then used his Xmas money to get his own little fridge to keep them.

T wanted a John Wayne cookbook for Christmas and then made dinner from it.
He made hamburgers and skillet macaroni. Yummy!

T had the last Cookie this year. Can you tell we watched Star Wars for my husband's birthday?

Absolutely enjoyed our party.

D celebrates his birthday!

We had lunch at Cracker Barrel.

And thanks to Disney went to see yet ANOTHER Star Wars movie on his birthday. This one was tolerable though. The rest of the family absolutely LOVED it.