Our Christmas

We had a great Christmas. We had my parents here (all to ourselves!) for a few fun days, then we took off for Cincinnati to spend a long weekend w/ the rest of the Bushfields. Claire had a blast, of course, with her cousins, and loved everything about Christmas. She often announced to us that, "Jesus was born in a manger! And Mary & Joseph too!" And when the pastor spoke of God's presence during the Christmas Eve service, she shrieked, "PRESENTS!" Needless to say, she loved the gifts on Christmas morning and said over & over as the morning progressed, "Oh my goodness!" Unfortunately she was dissapointed on Dec 26th when she woke up expecting more presents and realized that the gifting was over & done with.

Santa brought Claire a new doll, so she has been quite busy. And now "Baby Emma," as well as about 10 other babies, sleep with her each night & join her for tea parties ("Cup of tea, Mommy?"). Greg's still working on getting over his fear of "girls will be girls and they will like dolls and pink and dress-up, etc". He better get used to it...this girl is a girly-girl!

If you don't know this, Greg had a run-in with a tank of gasoline a few months back. Our family mobile is a VW Passat Wagon TDI, which generally prefers diesel over gasoline. Unfortunately when all packed up (kid, dog, gifts & luggage) and leaving town in November, he learned the hard way that our car doesn't run so well on gasoline (oops!). 24 hours later we again began our roadtrip; lesson learned (& a lot of teasing----including Claire now yelling to Greg when we stop for fuel, "It's the green one, Daddy!"). This was one of my favorite gifts I gave Greg this Christmas....good thing he knows how to take a teasing...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!