Happy New Year!

What a week! So I mentioned in my last post about the power outage we had because of snow and high winds....well Christmas Eve morning the power went out AGAIN! The power company said it was because of bad weather conditions but seriously, it wasn't bad since the last outage on Monday! Anyway, by the time Kaylee woke up from her nap it was time to go to the ILs as we usually do on Christmas Eve so we just stayed there until 7:45 or so and looked at the lights on the way home, trying to drag it out to give it more time. When we got home at something to 9, the power was back on and had only been on for about 45 minutes. Good thing we went to look at the lights! LOL The power went out again around 10 that night but came back on after 5 minutes. I'm sure lots of people here in Nova Scotia hate the power company now. LOL

So Christmas morning went pretty well. The girls got up pretty early as usual, but Santa left a stocking in each of their rooms to keep them occupied for a bit longer. Around 7 we took a shower and got ready to go downstairs and see what Santa brought them. While they looked at their stuff DH got up so we could start watching (& recording) them open their presents, which took all of 40 minutes. After a bit of cleaning up, Barry and I opened our presents. We got a lot of nice stuff, but the one thing I love was from Barry. A beautiful white gold and diamond snowflake pendant (with a fine box chain necklace). I can't find a pic of it online, but here it is from the flyer showing it. I love snowflakes-as long as they aren't accumulated on the ground-so this was perfect! He was so proud of himself :)

I also got a 250GB Western Digital My Passport Essential portable hard drive from my ILs. We are going to use my other one (not a portable one) for our PVR (satellite receiver with a hard drive) so we can dump recorded movies and stuff we want to keep onto it without using up the space on the PVR. It'll make it easier to find the shows we need to watch without having to scroll through a lot of shows.

After lunch the ILs came and got the girls to take them to see my niece for a bit then take them to their house where Barry and I would go later. We settled down to watch Polar Express since Barry doesn't get to see many Christmas movies because he works so much, and we ended up falling asleep, thus being a tad late for dinner. MIL said dinner was at 4, but to be there a bit early...we arrived at 4:10. Not terribly bad, especially since supper wasn't actually ready until about 4:30. It was a good dinner and it was nice to have Barry's grandfather there as well.

On Boxing Day we packed up and headed to my parents house an hour away (hopefully the last time we'll have to do that since next year we might be living there!) and when we got there, my Dad handed me a few cards..one from my grandmother with a bit of money for us and the girls, and one from my grandfather. I was expecting some money because he always gives us some every year, but when I opened it there was a $5000 cheque in there! I was stunned to say the least...I just kept asking "what?"..."what?". I didn't understand why it was that much money. I guess he wanted to give all his grandkids their inheritance money before he passed on so he can see us enjoy it. This was perfect timing because we know we'll have some expenses coming with fixing up this house to sell then fixing up the new house and buying new furniture or whatever.

Mom, my sister and I went out shopping for 5 hours on Saturday! Some of the gifts Mom got for us had to be exchanged, but because most stores weren't doing returns or exchanges that day, she was just buying us new stuff and will do the returns later. She got each of the girls a pair of shoe/sneakers at Payless and a Baby Alive Baby Go Bye Bye doll for Kaylee. I got Kristen a snowman Webkinz and a Bratz microphone for Kaylee since she loves to pretend she's giving a concert.

So my grandfather said to buy something fun with the money, so I bought Kristen a Nintendo DS (silver), a starter kit with case and car charger (like the one on the left but the earphones are different) and 2 games, Brain Age (for me really) and Mario Kart. When we went out yesterday I also got her Super Mario Bros. because I knew it'd be fun. We can't really rent DS games here to check them out before buying so you have to go by what's on the back of the box and what you see online a lot of the time.

I've been wanting a compact camera that I can pop in my purse, so I bought a Canon SD770 IS, case (red of course!) and a 1GB card. Barry was angry when he found out I'd bought another camera, but I've been telling him for a while that I wanted one, so it shouldn't have been a surprise!

As I mentioned above, I took the girls to the mall again yesterday to not only get Kristen a new game, but I wanted to get something for Barry and since he pretty much has all the gadgets he needs, I thought I'd get him the documentary series called Long Way Round with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. We just finished watching their second documentary Long Way Down last week so I thought he'd like to see the other one. We started watching it when we had our fondue after the girls went to bed last night and finished after episode 4 of 10 at about 12:45am. At least this way Barry actually stayed awake till midnight!

Normally at midnight I go and take a picture of each of the girls sleeping, but it didn't turn out that great this year...I went upstairs to take pictures and people outside were doing some fireworks which woke up Kristen (she wakes up for nothing but fireworks or the power going out) and started talking, which woke up Kaylee who started crying. She went back to sleep quickly so I got a picture of her sleeping, but I just got a picture of Kristen while she was awake...you know, capturing the moment and stuff. I'll definitely have to journal in length about that when I do my layout. LOL Here are the pics I took:

So that was our Christmas and our New Years...one for the books that's for sure! Here are some pics of our holiday!

I've done one lone layout since my last post...another template from the SSD Cookie Exchange.

Hope you had fun reading my book! LOL Happy New Year! I'll be taking down all the decorations after the girls go to bed tonight :(