The week before Christmas

It has been a busy couple of weeks and now we find ourselves almost at Christmas.  Last Saturday, Teresa organized a shopping day with mostly family members. There was 13 of us all together.We planned to meet at Teresa's house for 8 o'clock so that we could get an early start. We were on the road by 830. We had arranged to pick up Bethany along the way. Sadly Bethany discovered that she had grabbed Kyle's passport instead of her own so she had to go back home to exchange it. Lydia arranged to meet us all at the shopping mall. She would drive Bethany home along with the rest of her daughters and then they would join later. Approximately 5 minutes before reaching the border we get a text from Linda saying that Yolanda just discovered that her passport was expired. We weren't sure what was going to happen. Fortunately it was only expired by a couple of days and they let her into the country. We enjoyed a wonderful day of shopping and just before heading for home Teresa realized that she had left her shopping bag in the food court. After a little bit of worry and a mad run back to the food court  she was reunited with her shopping bag. We really enjoyed the day and look forward to doing it again sometime.

On Monday Claudia, Arja, Teresa and I went out for dinner and celebrated the Christmas season. Sadly Grace wasn't able to join us this year and we all missed her. Dinner was very nice and we spent almost 3 hours relaxing over our meal. Dinner was delicious and it was a really nice evening.

On Tuesday we went to visit Mom. We had arranged in advance for Jim and Debbie to join us as well as Ed and Janice. Unfortunately Janice wasn't feeling that well so she stayed home. We celebrated Christmas all together with Mom and had a really enjoyable evening. We are planning to get together again with the whole family on Saturday and we are looking forward to that as well. The next couple of days are filled with work events. I will be having Christmas lunches and dinners for the rest of the week.  I'm looking forward to our family get together on Saturday and also our get together on Friday evening with Harry and Marion and Teresa in Lawrence.  This has become a yearly tradition for us and it's a nice way to relax before the busyness of the weekend.