The week between Christmas and New Years day it very unique. I love it. Ryan and I usually take it off and of course the kids are out of school. There is no structure. You bounce back and forth between constructive activities, and wasting time. There is no time. You don’t know what day it is. It doesn’t matter because there is no schedule, no demands. If there is something scheduled it most likely will be forgotten. Sometimes you go to bed at 8pm. Sometimes it is 2am. Sometimes you shower and get dressed for the day, sometimes you don’t. I get to be my true introvert self and rarely leave the house. A lack of a plan is the plan. We love it.
We had lots of relaxing, family time activities. The Bourne’s were at Grandma’s all week so my girls spent most of their days playing with them. The weather wasn’t to bad so they even went to the park a few times and got to be outside. I took them to the church one afternoon to play in the gym and draw on the giant chalk boards.
Grandpa Terry, Emilee and Jovee all gave talks on Sunday. We had a family dinner with everyone at our house afterwards to celebrate getting to go to three sacraments. Lots of games were played and football was watched. I caught Ryan getting a little extra snuggle time in with Emilee while he explained something about football rules to her.
Becky invited me to go to a paint class with her so we filled one of our afternoons painting a winter sunset scene. I really like painting. I never know what to do with it when I’m done, it is not good enough to hang up anywhere. It is a fun thing to do and I like learning the techniques and creating things.
Ryan and I worked on some projects together. He made some awesome shelves for my holiday decoration boxes. I can now take one at a time out without having to restack or take other boxes out of the way. I LOVE IT. I went through all my decorations and storage stuff and organized it and cleaned it out. So satisfying. We got a new security system that Ryan installed too. We live far enough away from people that there aren’t that many people but not far enough that I don’t think a weirdo wouldn’t wander by. Ryan got a dart board for Christmas so we hung that up and put a frame around it to help protect the wall a little from wayward darts.
We celebrated New Years Eve at our house with all the Terry Family. We had lots of food and yummy treats. We watched movies, played games, ate and visited while we passed the time away until midnight. I made a balloon drop with confetti for the kids to pull down when we got to midnight.
https://youtu.be/v5mnrlAsQ8E?list=PLBwkO01uWtw9DJu2WA-l0-1CZ6EuoK5Kl
It was a fun night to celebrate the last day of the year and the starting of a new one. It is pretty crazy to look back over a year and see and the things that happened and how things changed. It is weird how things change and don’t change at the same time. I think 2024 was good to us. We had some good times and made new memories together. No broken bones. I waited until 2025 had started before I typed that. We are not perfect but we are blessed and grateful for our good health and the comfortable lives we all have. There is a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now and we are mostly untouched by it. 2025 will bring a new chapter into our families lives. The foremost in my mind is Matthew will graduate and is planning on going on a mission and the dynamics of our family will shift from how we have known them for the last 18 years. For the last picture of this edition of my blog I thought I would put this picture. I wish I had one of our whole family doing this but this one will work. Ciao 2024
