Typical December Weekend

After a hectic week at work I was really looking forward to a weekend.

Friday night Tanya met up with friends for an evening of Scrap booking. She spends many hours a month, all year long, dedicated to creating beautiful memories for our family. Similar to the Growth Chart I talked about a few posts ago, projects such as these frequently fall by the wayside with little notice... only to be regretted years or decades later. Kudos to Tanya for her steadfast dedication to capturing the moments now so that we may share them with others in the future.

While she was scrap booking, the girls had a couple friends over and they all enjoyed attending Friday night Open Gym.

I enjoyed 45 minutes of quiet time at home. Well, I enjoyed 10 minutes of quiet time and then endured 35 minutes of barking dogs. There's some motivation to get the yard fenced.

Saturday started with Alexia & Tanya heading off to Christmas Pageant practice while Mikayla and I ran a few errands. Safeway, Starbucks, Safeway, Wal-Marche.

After lunch we jumped into the car for the annual Christmas Tree Hunt. We could have (should have) just hunted in the garage for the artificial tree, but instead we took advantage of the weather to visit the Hovde Tree Farm between Alger and Acme. (Yes, Acme, like in the Road runner / Coyote cartoons).

The weather was fantastic, albeit quite cold. There was even a trace of snow on the upper parts of the tree farm. We walked all around, twice, took some mandatory scrapbook pictures and finally chose the tree that looked a little bit better than Lisa's tree from last year.

Girls by the tree house:


Alexia locates the redneck chainsaw manger scene:


Double Whammy: Eric cuts down the tree and you can see his slowly receding hairline:


We made a couple stops in the old neighborhood (Glenhaven) as we drove by to check on our old house, the clubhouse, the lakes and the pool.

Once back home, we unloaded the tree, stuck it haphazardly in the tree stand with some water and then darted off to the small town Sedro-Woolley Christmas Parade.


Mikayla, Josie, Alexia and Katrina were all in the parade with the 4-H club. Since it was dark, it was difficult to capture photographic images of the event. Here is Alexia on the float:


Here is a ghost-like almost image of Mikayla (upper arrow, in a teal coat) and Josie (lower arrow, in the white fur):


Once the parade was over we headed back home to decorate the Christmas tree and enjoy the typical family holiday decorating conversations.

Topics this year included a number of exciting debates, such as:
1) Where should the tree should be located?
2) Is the tree straight yet?
3) Are the lights on the tree yet so we can put on the ornaments?
and the most popular topic of all:
4) What do you mean we don't have any tree lights?

Three trips to the store and four hours later the tree was deemed to be 'decorated'.


Alexia exclaimed that she would never forget this day because she got to stay up until 10:30pm to decorate the tree. That's her equivalent of "THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER!"

Sunday started with another Christmas pageant rehearsal and church, followed by a clean out of our 'under the stairs' storage area before heading out to dinner.

While cleaning out from under the stairs we uncovered some photo albums from the 'before kids' era. Alexia came across a fantastic honeymoon picture of T & I on a catamaran outside of Maui. She couldn't believe it was us and exclaimed "Mom's wearing a bikini! She HATES bikini's!".

We met up with Kim, Chris, Kari, Troy and their kids for dinner at Red Robin for Kim's birthday. Dinner itself wasn't too unusual... except that Mikayla started to not feel well. Then she started feeling worse. And worse.

We rushed home with Mikayla becoming more anxious to be home as soon as possible. A short while after arriving at home, Mikalya emerged from the bathroom with something interesting to show us.

A quick call to the Asthma/Allergy doc put us (mostly) at ease and then we worked to ease Mikayla's anxiety.
Between her sister and her mother, Mikayla has seen a lot of medical conditions over the years so changes such as this tend to cause her undue stress.

We'll keep an eye on her for changes and see what happens on Monday morning.

Thus ends another typical Rolfs December weekend.

Happy Holidays!

~E