christmas at the cabin

alright, it's wednesday already for the love. i'm gonna back date one post that i wrote over the weekend and then try to sum up the rest of the weekend here.

on saturday, jake slept til around 8:30a (!!) and we had a yummy breakfast and lounged around until the company arrived. Around 12:45p, L's mom's mom and aunt, uncle, and cousins showed up and they gals spent the afternoon making gingerbread houses. the guys went downstairs and watched a good portion of ut's awesome comeback against ut - two straight years ut picks up big wins against texas. ut will have 10 wins before conference and you can't expect them to be much worse than, say, 12-4 in conference. that's 22 wins before the sec tourney! i'm loving the bruce pearl era.

in the evening, we had some savory steaks and burgers on the outdoor built-in jenn-air grill - that thing is great! over the course of the weekend, we watched some movies: christmas vacation (friday night), invincible (later friday night?), little miss sunshine (sunday afternoon)

ah, i guess that means i should get to sunday. since we were packing up and leaving on monday morning (christmas day), we decided to make sunday morning (christmas eve) 'christmas morning'. we got some new, awesome cookware (emeril stuff) and L was very surprised by a string of pearls i got her. i also had a few surprises: a travel mug with a picture of L and Jake printed on it, some baseball pj pants, a rotating spice rack (18 new bottles!), a really good chef knife (the big one), and the little miss sunshine dvd.

as expected, jake racked up with a bunch of games; an artist's easel; an atv-looking power wheels; a fire truck / big rig that expands into a playset; buzz, woody, and jessie 'action figures'; and a cool aqua doodle drawing pad.

i helped dad make greek spaghetti for lunch and we all lounged most of the day. sunday evening, dad and i went down to the wears valley umc christmas eve candlelight and communion service. it was packed out with probably half of the 200+ being vacationers like us. keep in mind, wears valley doesn't even have a post office yet - just a couple of gas stations, a few churches, some cabin rental places, and some shops. a fun little community though.

when we got back, we tried to eat up leftovers from the weekend so there would be less to take home. on monday morning, we packed up and had to put the cookware, the fire truck thing, and the power wheel on top of the highlander. we got home safe and sound about 4 hours later even though it poured the rain and soaked the cardboard boxes on top.