2017-18 holidays, part 1


Before I get into the pictures from the holiday season, I figured I should catch up on the weeks leading up to this season's adventures.  Hope is pictured above in her anniversary/birthday/Christmas gift...a new Nissan Versa.  This is a bare-bones car to supplement our building fleet; it gets very good gas mileage and will accumulate the daily miles Hope drives to and from work, rather than our minivan, which is only a few years old but has almost 190,000 miles on it!  We got it for a song on a "Black Friday" weekend sale, and figured it was too good of a deal to pass up on.

Needless to say, we didn't use it to pull the float pictured below, which is packed with kids from our church (St. Mark) in Monticello:


One of the great things about small town living in the South is they love parades; Monticello alone does 3-4 per year.  Good family fun!  As was the 16th birthday of our eldest, Kenny:


(Yes, we've got mismatched candles!).  Kenny's birthday was soon accompanied by that next big stage in his life--getting his driver's license!  We've now got a third driver in the family (helping to justify the purchase of another car).  This period before Christmas was filled with other kid-related events, including band concerts, a robotics competition for Stephen and his fellow 4-H'ers:



holiday parties (yes, Beth actually wanted the Bob Ross chia pet!):


and, of course, the annual tradition of decorating Christmas cookies:


This tradition will be followed by the January tradition of dieting to lose the holiday weight gain...  Although we were plenty busy, we did have some time to sit at home and enjoy some fires in our fireplace, although few enjoyed them more than Draco our cat, shown below as melting into the couch:


I'll have more from our holiday visits up north in my next blog installment; just didn't want to have too many in one post.  We're back in Arkansas now, getting ready to return to the grind, so we'd like to wish y'all one final Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

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