Christmas! Yee Hah!

We have arrived at the point at which it makes more sense for us to travel for Christmas than our kids and their kids. That means we're officially old.
This year we did the lazy thing and drove the two hours to Jacksonville, on the North Carolina coast, where our daughter, her husband and their four kids live.  On the lead-up to the Big Day! we took walks, 

slid on slides, 

swung on swings, 

rode bikes, played Monopoly (warning: Paula cheats, I think) and wrapped presents.

Oh, and ate way too much of everything.  At every meal.  And in between.

Christmas morning finally arrived!!  The kids awakened at the usual zero AM, but house rules delayed the bedroom breakout until 7:00 AM, as determined by NIST-F1, a cesium fountain clock in the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, and with which, I believe, every kid in the US is connected on December 25.  

You know, it's hard to predict what is going to ring someone's chimes.  Take duct tape, which when I last looked, was near the top of The 100 Things Least Likely to Appear on a Six-Year-Old Boy's Christmas List.  However, Brynn's younger son was ecstatic, being an imaginative kid who loves to make strange things with cardboard and other easily-obtained materials. 

I ignored the other list, The Top 100 Things Least Likely to Appear On A Refined, Beautiful Woman's Christmas List, and hit a home run.  That's right - WADERS!!

Wow!  Lovely!  Let me 'splain, as Rick Ricardo would have said.  Unable to tolerate any disorder in her gardens, Paula finds it frequently necessary to clean pine straw and weeds from around the pond in her Japanese garden. 

However, this is not without its hazards.  (Actual simulated picture of Paula falling in pond.)

Hence the waders, and believe it or not, she loved them.  

Also, being a Careful Person, who follows the rules, she read the Warnings and Instructions, in Spanish and English.  For waders?! 

I was the recipient of much generosity and thoughtfulness on the part of my family (more later).  On the other hand, I received this, yes, the ugliest watch yet constructed by man. I had successfully gotten rid of it back to an Elder who had 'accidentally' left it in the mission home in Huancayo after I made appropriately disparaging comments concerning it's utter ugliness and remarked that whoever sold it to him for about $2.00 must be still laughing.

He must have accidentally sent it to me.  I'll need to return it at some point...

It's been a great Christmas, and we hope yours is as joyful.

Dave & Paula