The Holiday Hussle

Can you believe that Christmas is over and it's New Years Eve?!? Where did 2010 go?  We had a wonderful Christmas with lots of traveling!  Not far traveling but we were still in the car quite a bit.  We started off by heading down to my parents house on Christmas Eve.  Spent some time with them and the dogs played a lot.  It's tradition in the Hill household to go to Mom mom & Pop pop's house for Christmas Eve dinner.  We went to dinner and had a great time with the family.  Every so often, we had to check NORAD to see where Santa was visiting!  Christmas Eve is always full of food, fun, chaos, and laughter!  Ben and I opened our presents from the family and received many wonderful gifts!  Thanks everyone!  Riley got a lot of presents too...she must've been really good this year! 

We headed back to Columbia that night and set out our presents for each other before heading to bed.  In my family, we always get up at 5am on Christmas morning....Ben's family tends to wake up a little later, haha.  Ben made me promise not to wake him before 7am so at 7 on the dot, he was shaken awake!  We opened our presents while Riley gnawed on a big rawhide from Santa.  After presents, we made breakfast together, which was french toast, bacon, eggs, and scrapple (for me....Ben hates the stuff).  It was quite a different Christmas than the ones we were both used to.  It was a lot quieter for me and a lot earlier for Ben!

Riley, Ben, and I headed over to the Alvarez's house for presents and my parents and brother joined us for a Christmas feast of steak and lobster tails!  The Hills then joined us at our little apartment for even more gifts!  Our Christmas day ended with watching Despicable Me on Ben's new Blu-ray player.

On Tuesday, we celebrated Christmas with my mom's side of the family.  Ben wasn't able to go due to work but I went and had a great time with the Ecks, Hills, Talleys, Semchenkos, Higgs, and Mowells!  ( Think I got everyone!)  Still more great presents and I got to meet my cousin's baby, Easton, for the first time!  He's a real cutie but I wasn't able to hold him since I was getting over a cold.  Next time though!

I believe that wraps up (hahaha) our very first Christmas together!  Happy New Year and see you in 2011!

Cookies, cookies, and more cookies!

Yesterday was cookie day for Ben and I...well, mainly me!  I started baking around 8:15am and finished up at 4:00pm.  The final count was 137 snowman cookies and 113 molasses cookies.  Most of them are gifts for people but we did save some for ourselves!  I thought 250 cookies was a lot to make but a friend of ours had cookie day with her extended family and they made 4,066 cookies!! That I cannot imagine doing!  Makes my 250 look like chump change but I did mine all by myself...that should count for something!

Riley was pretty well behaved with all the cookie smells around her.  She did manage to steal a few snowmen off the baking stone before they were put into the oven.  After the second steal, she realized that she wasn't allowed to do that and was a pretty good girl the rest of the day. 

Here are some pictures of the cookie madness!

And here's just a cute but weird picture of Riley.  She stayed like this for a few minutes!  I don't know if she was stretching or what!