I hope everyone had a nice Christmas. I know we sure did! The hub, who is always a thoughtful gift giver wowed me once again with an Anthropologie gift card, JCrew t-shirts, a popcorn machine and a pair of Hunter rain boots which I have been totally wanting since I went to London this past summer. The hub used these pretty hair clips to attach name tags to the presents and somehow managed to get our dog, Moses to address each name tag and leave comments (so cute!). Babe knows I love Anthropologie, he knows I have a crazy passion for popcorn and he even tracked down the last pair of black, size 6 rain boots in the United States because I have a hankering to walk in the rain. And a girl must have knee high rain boots to splash around in or at the very least, to look trendy in, in LA. So you are probably asking what I got the hubby. Well, since the hubby has a birthday only two days before xmas, there were a lot of presents for him. However, I must say, I think I did a bad job of mixing the two sets of presents up. You see, I gave him all the fun stuff for his brithday and gave him all the clothes for xmas. Of course I didn't realize this until he was opening box after box of clothing during our exchange. Oh well, one of these years I will be awesome like him. Amazingly the cool presents kept on flowing when we arrived in Sanger on Christmas Eve and celebrated the holiday at his mum's house. I was supposed to work half a day and leave work at 1pm but since no one seemed to be going into the office on Christmas Eve I worked from my Blackberry. This allowed us to get on the road to Sanger earlier than expected. We rolled into town around 2:30pm and immediately ran into Frederick and Morgan, the hub's parents' adopted kids a.k.a. the neighbor kids who love the hubs parents. 
My eyes were immediately drawn to the fire place which always has a ton of stockings hanging from it but this year the line of stockings seemed to be even longer! This year there were doggie stockings for Moses and Irie and also stockings for Frederick, Morgan and Charlie (another adopted child). 
Immediately upon arriving, the hub's mum gave him his birthday present. Wrapped in cool doggie paper (because me and the hubby's life is all about dogs these days) was a GPS thing-y that the hub can use geocaching. If you were like me about two weeks ago, you are like what the heck is geocaching??? Well, it's sort of like treasure hunting. People all over the world have hidden items and they put the coordinates online and you use the GPS thing-y to find the hidden items. Online you can find various coordinates and hike around your town, your state, the world in search of hidden stuff. There isn't cash or anything but basically once you find the the box you can write your name on a list that is inside. Sometimes there are small trinkets you can take and hide in another location. The fun part is trying to figure out the clues in finding the object. Today we went and searched for a hidden cache in our neighborhood. The hub had tried it yesterday with no luck but today we took Moses and found it in a park that is in our neighborhood. A small magnetic box was hidden under a park bench. You have to be careful that muggles don't see what you are doing. Like in Harry Potter, muggles are non-wizarding a.k.a. non-geocaching people. If you find a hidden cache you need to make sure no one sees that you found it otherwise they might steal it and not know they are disrupting the game. Geocahing presents aside, that night, the hubby's mom, cooked a grand, soul food meal for all of us. No ham or over baked turkey for us. Nope, we had BBQ ribs, sweet potatoes, mac-n-cheese and salad and it was delicious but then again, I don't think I have ever had a bad meal at my husband's parents house. Everyone enjoyed the meal which was a departure from the standard holiday fair. The hub's grandma came over and so did the hub's brother and family. Along with Charlie, Frederick and Morgan we all ripped into our X-mas presents. Tradition in the household is for the youngest to go first and then the next and so on. So my poor nephew after tearing into a million presents had to wait to play until everyone else opened theirs. 
As you can imagine he didn't want to wait! Moses was very happy with his toys and bones. A juicy bone kept him busy while everyone opened presents. All of us got a lot of great presents. The hub got Beatles Rock Band so I guess that means there will be a microphone and a set of drums inhibiting our living room from now on! hehe
The next day we went to Berts and Louie's house for a Christmas Day celebration. There was more yummy food like crab legs, twice-baked potatoes and cheesecake! There was the annual white elephant exchange where no one steals gifts. This group is way too nice. Eventually someone did steal a gift which set off a nice chain of stealing like a 17-year-old stealing a bottle of liquor from a 14-year-old. I am just glad we ended up with lottery tickets (the hub won $23 dollars and sadly, didn't win the huge $46 million jackpot) and a comfy foam pillow. Moses had a good time playing with Rocky, Louie's boxer. It's the first time that Moses has ever really played with a dog so it was fun to watch. Everyone was worried that Rocky might tear poor pretty boy Moses apart but he didn't and the two had a ton of fun and Mo even smacked Rocky around a few times. Our last celebration took place the day after Christmas. The hubby's mom threw a little Christmas party for Fay-Fay and Mo-Mo, the hub's other set of parents. We always have fun together and this time was no exception with quite a few bottles of wine! It was nice to catch up with those guys and hear about the hub's step-brother's upcoming wedding. Looks like there will be another wedding at Rod and Rosie's this October.
Our last day in Sanger was all about another kind of celebration...a wedding. The hub's cousin was married at a huge banquet hall. There were 200 hundred people. For some reason I was thinking it would be small so color me surprised when we walked in and there was a banquet hall of tables!!! I was so glad to see Bucky yet again! Bucky is the guy we named he hub's dad's turtle after. It was great to see the legendary Bucky in person.
We left the cold behind on Monday and came back to sunny, warm, Los Angeles. We spent the rest of our day organizing all of our Christmas loot. Then we played a couple of games of Super Mario Bros on Wii. We received a couple of Wii conrollers which allows the hub and I to play games together. We even have a third controller incase a friend stops by!! We had plan to do a bit of traveling with our week off but we both felt like that we had done enough traveling this year so instead we decided to relax at home this week. Which is sooooo nice!! It's so wonderful to be able to sleep in and not worry about getting up for a meeting!
My eyes were immediately drawn to the fire place which always has a ton of stockings hanging from it but this year the line of stockings seemed to be even longer! This year there were doggie stockings for Moses and Irie and also stockings for Frederick, Morgan and Charlie (another adopted child). 
Immediately upon arriving, the hub's mum gave him his birthday present. Wrapped in cool doggie paper (because me and the hubby's life is all about dogs these days) was a GPS thing-y that the hub can use geocaching. If you were like me about two weeks ago, you are like what the heck is geocaching??? Well, it's sort of like treasure hunting. People all over the world have hidden items and they put the coordinates online and you use the GPS thing-y to find the hidden items. Online you can find various coordinates and hike around your town, your state, the world in search of hidden stuff. There isn't cash or anything but basically once you find the the box you can write your name on a list that is inside. Sometimes there are small trinkets you can take and hide in another location. The fun part is trying to figure out the clues in finding the object. Today we went and searched for a hidden cache in our neighborhood. The hub had tried it yesterday with no luck but today we took Moses and found it in a park that is in our neighborhood. A small magnetic box was hidden under a park bench. You have to be careful that muggles don't see what you are doing. Like in Harry Potter, muggles are non-wizarding a.k.a. non-geocaching people. If you find a hidden cache you need to make sure no one sees that you found it otherwise they might steal it and not know they are disrupting the game. Geocahing presents aside, that night, the hubby's mom, cooked a grand, soul food meal for all of us. No ham or over baked turkey for us. Nope, we had BBQ ribs, sweet potatoes, mac-n-cheese and salad and it was delicious but then again, I don't think I have ever had a bad meal at my husband's parents house. Everyone enjoyed the meal which was a departure from the standard holiday fair. The hub's grandma came over and so did the hub's brother and family. Along with Charlie, Frederick and Morgan we all ripped into our X-mas presents. Tradition in the household is for the youngest to go first and then the next and so on. So my poor nephew after tearing into a million presents had to wait to play until everyone else opened theirs. 
As you can imagine he didn't want to wait! Moses was very happy with his toys and bones. A juicy bone kept him busy while everyone opened presents. All of us got a lot of great presents. The hub got Beatles Rock Band so I guess that means there will be a microphone and a set of drums inhibiting our living room from now on! hehe
The next day we went to Berts and Louie's house for a Christmas Day celebration. There was more yummy food like crab legs, twice-baked potatoes and cheesecake! There was the annual white elephant exchange where no one steals gifts. This group is way too nice. Eventually someone did steal a gift which set off a nice chain of stealing like a 17-year-old stealing a bottle of liquor from a 14-year-old. I am just glad we ended up with lottery tickets (the hub won $23 dollars and sadly, didn't win the huge $46 million jackpot) and a comfy foam pillow. Moses had a good time playing with Rocky, Louie's boxer. It's the first time that Moses has ever really played with a dog so it was fun to watch. Everyone was worried that Rocky might tear poor pretty boy Moses apart but he didn't and the two had a ton of fun and Mo even smacked Rocky around a few times. Our last celebration took place the day after Christmas. The hubby's mom threw a little Christmas party for Fay-Fay and Mo-Mo, the hub's other set of parents. We always have fun together and this time was no exception with quite a few bottles of wine! It was nice to catch up with those guys and hear about the hub's step-brother's upcoming wedding. Looks like there will be another wedding at Rod and Rosie's this October. Our last day in Sanger was all about another kind of celebration...a wedding. The hub's cousin was married at a huge banquet hall. There were 200 hundred people. For some reason I was thinking it would be small so color me surprised when we walked in and there was a banquet hall of tables!!! I was so glad to see Bucky yet again! Bucky is the guy we named he hub's dad's turtle after. It was great to see the legendary Bucky in person.
We left the cold behind on Monday and came back to sunny, warm, Los Angeles. We spent the rest of our day organizing all of our Christmas loot. Then we played a couple of games of Super Mario Bros on Wii. We received a couple of Wii conrollers which allows the hub and I to play games together. We even have a third controller incase a friend stops by!! We had plan to do a bit of traveling with our week off but we both felt like that we had done enough traveling this year so instead we decided to relax at home this week. Which is sooooo nice!! It's so wonderful to be able to sleep in and not worry about getting up for a meeting!
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