I Like #145

Well!  Hello everyone and welcome to 2020!  I completely missed last week, home for Christmas with my family which meant one million things to like but I forgot to post them!  So this week we have a fairly long list, but I'll cut it down from one million to something more manageable.  I'm looking forward to 2020, but right now still basking in the holiday glow from the last week.

So here we go!


1.  I love my home church!  I got to sing with my parent's church choir for two Sundays plus Christmas eve and helped the parish decorate for Christmas after the 4 Advent service.  Really feels like home.  I also snagged their old altar cover, after several decades, the embroidery had rotted away in the sun, so I re-embroidered it last Sunday afternoon. 

2.  I love the holiday baking!  My mom made homemade panettone twice (delicious), my sister brought tons of beautiful and tasty cookies, I brought tasty but less beautiful cookies, and there was altogether too much delicious food and pie and everything.  Yum.  Now we're all going back to normal eating, so hopefully that will be good.  To be fair, we did eat lots of salad at lunch, but somehow I dont' think it balanced out all the cookies.

3.  I love family games!  No pictures of this one, but we played tons of Catan, both the card game and board game, and bridge, and spinner (a dominoes game) and rummikub, and obsession (aka the victorian ladies game), and uno, and spot it.  Really great fun.  My sister made a box full of balloons that each had a fun activity inside so every time the kids got bored we popped a new balloon!  So creative and wonderful

4.  I love quilting and sewing with my mom!!  She and I had several days to work on projects before my sister arrived, and I'll be sharing more about them as I make progress in the weeks to come.  But here's a small peek at one of the things I'm working on!

5.  I love quilting and sewing with Anna!  My mom helped Anna piece a whole baby quilt, and then also let her do the longarming on a t-shirt quilt Becky got in a church fundraiser.  It was just tied, so Becky wanted to quilt it for extra stability, but Anna had a lot of fun quilting with the longarm (with Muddy's help)!

6. I love playing with both kids!  We did playdoh, and I played pokemon with them, and went swimming and played ball with the dog, and did lots of snuggling and listening to stories.  I got them a book of Scottish fairy tales when I was in Scotland this year as part of their Christmas present.  We read several over the break and boy are some of them weird.  Fun though!

7. I love my family!  I got a couple of good snaps of my grandparents with my dad and his siblings after Christmas dinner.  We also took family pictures of my immediate family.  Some of them turned out really cute, but then my mom wanted to have one with all the people and all the dogs.  It was chaos!!  This was the best one, so it was a good thing we had the other pictures with just the people.  There are supposed to be 7 people and 7 dogs.  See if you can spot everyone.

8.  Then mom thought maybe we could take pictures of just the dogs outside-  that wound up being mostly outtakes too, but we got a few good ones!  I almost adopted another dog over Christmas; on Christmas even our priest and church secretary rescued a mama dog and three pups from a ditch out in the country near a restaurant.  It was a long story, but they (and others eating at the restaurant) had been feeding the mama because she was skin and bones for a while but no one wanted to rescue her because they knew she had pups somewhere. Anyway, by Christmas eve they finally figured out where the pups were and brought them in.  It was so fantastic to be greeted by a great group of dogs at the church office when we went for midnight mass!  I was going to adopt the mama dog (I'm not really a puppy person), but I think the priest decided to keep her (she already has three other dogs) so I know she'll have a good home.

9.  I love hiking in the mountains!  We did a fair number of short hikes up in the mountains with the kids and dogs, and it was so wonderful to get outside and moving around!  Blue DID NOT like the cows, but luckily they were only really close to the trail one day.

There were so many other things to love, most of which I didn't get any pictures of.  But it's really such a wonderful blessing and privilege to have gotten to spend so much time with family I enjoy so much.  Kind of a letdown to be back at work!!   I hope you all had a joyful Christmas!  Click on over to LeeAnna's to find more things to like!