Christmas Day was fun. Being a Sunday, we attended church in the morning and then opened gifts afterward. As you can tell by the wrapping paper left in their wake, the boys got plenty of loot. (We think we spoiled them sufficiently to "make up" for last year, and we hope James is still young enough that he won't have similar expectations for next year.) Our friends, the McCarts, invited us over for Christmas dinner, so we didn't even have to stress about preparing a holiday meal. Yay! It was an enjoyable day for the whole family.
The week following Christmas was a bit miserable because both parents caught a nasty flu bug at the same time... not pretty... Simon brought the illness home from somewhere and the 3 of us were sick for about 10 days each. It was a bit dicey there for a while, but fortunately, James never got sick and the rest of us are almost completely back to normal. Due to illness and general tiredness, our celebration of the New Year was totally unremarkable. Jay and I stayed up until midnight mostly because we are night owls, but also because our neighbors set off really loud fireworks until 1 am.
We celebrated the New Year and Simon's 2nd birthday with a small dinner party (just the elder missionaries and our friends, the McCart family). We had a nice ham dinner with all the usual trimmings and Jay made Simon a really cool (and yummy) dragon cake that he absolutely loved. (Ooooh, a dragon, rarrr!) Sometimes, it's difficult to believe Simon is 2 years old already. Then again, he certainly is sassy enough to be two...
