A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I don't know why it's taken me forever to blog, but I'm finally doing it. We had a wonderful Christmas. We drove to California on the 20th and spent until Christmas morning with my family and then hopped on over to the Nowland's until we left on the 28th. The Astle half of the trip was spent watching movies, reading, singing, doing puzzles, playing games and chatting. My mom and I sang "O Holy Night" in church for I think the 5th year in a row now and it went really well. We had friends from Concord over for our tradition of singing Christmas carols and Messiah highlights (we've been doing that with them for as long as I can remember). Christmas morning was great too. Some highlights: I got new dishes (set of 12, woohoo!) and Jeremy got a wheat grinder and water purifier.

So my parents and Heidi left Christmas day about 11:15 to fly to New Jersey to see my sister Wendy who just had her third baby! A beautiful girl named Vanessa Christine McNiven and she was a hefty 9 lbs. 4 oz. and 22 in. long. So when they left we went over to the Nowlands and had fun with the 5 grandkids that were all there and 2 of Jeremy's brothers and his sister. We also played some fun games (the Nowlands are great gamers) and played with the Wii that Santa brought! The whole vacation also included eating way too much food of course, but having a great time with family and enjoying some time of relaxation. Highlight gifts from the Nowlands included slippers for me (yea!!!!) and fence posts for Jeremy. His dad was able to get a bunch from his work. He works at a power plant and people bring their waste there and someone brought a ton of fence posts that had been slightly burned, so George took them and is going to trim the burnt edges and bring them out to us for a fence. A very nice, time-consuming gift!

Eli got a few presents too and lots of great hand-me-down clothes! (by the way, that's what we're planning on naming our boy, for those who didn't know). Both grandmas got some really cute clothes, blankets, bibs, etc. and Aunt Becky and Yaya (Grandma Nowland) spent hours making a really nice Quiet Time ABC book. It's filled with lots of pictures of family, (i.e. D for Daddy), the temple, and so forth. We feel so blessed to have such wonderful families and are grateful that our sweet baby boy has such wonderful support already! Thank you families!

Steve, me, Jeremy & Heidi on Christmas Eve
Cooking on Christmas Eve-Eve
Sisters :)
Our gorgeous Christmas Eve feast; not everyone gets ham with one family on Christmas Eve and prime rib with the other family on Christmas Day! Yummy!
Christmas morning - looking lovely :)
Steve and mom
Jeremy with the kids - Ben, Lucy and Catelyn. Kids love this guy... so do I :)
Papa and Becky
Cutie pie Lydia
All the kids - Lydia, Lucy, Ben, Catelyn, and Cooper