Recovering

This Christmas was an especially stressful one for me.  With adding extra hours in at the flower shop to get Christmas orders out in time and finding the time in between to bake and decorate eighty dozen sugar cookies, trying to fit in the "regular" Christmas activities and concerts among the other projects was almost too much for me.  It seemed that this year in particular was even more busy than other years for most of my friends and family as well.

Once the pre-Christmas rush was mostly over, we went to spend an early Christmas with Pete's family in Rocky.  We celebrated with Pete's grandma, brother, and sister-in-law who came from the US for a surprise visit.  We had a great time with them!  Staying there away from the chaos at home, we had the chance to really grasp that Pete's parents were moving across the country just one week after Christmas.  We had a very short goodbye a few days ago and they are now on the road to Ontario.

Adding to our household stress level, we came home from Rocky a couple of days before Christmas to find that the water pipes heading into our house had frozen solid, leaving us with no running water until the afternoon of Christmas day. Luckily Pete was off work and was able to devote his time to thawing everything out; the poor guy was outside in the minus 30 weather for hours each day. But his cold, hard work paid off and we were relieved not to get plumbers involved.  Our friends and family graciously let us take showers at their houses and move our Christmas celebrations at the last minute.

The boys had a great Christmas, enjoying their vast array of new gifts, and loving the time off to stay up late and have lots of playtime.  They are starting to get bored of eachother now and excited to get back to their friends at school!

We had our annual New Year's Eve bash with a smaller amount of guests than usual this time, which made for a nice low-key evening.  Just what we needed.

And now with our final weekend together before the normalcy strikes again, we are mostly recovered, relaxed, and ready to get back to it.  We're excited to see what 2013 will bring!