Christmas 2008

Before I get too far into the new year, I wanted to finally get around to posting a snapshot of our Christmases... I think we had about 5 of them, when all was said and done. I think I only managed to get pictures of 3 of them before I got tired of taking pictures. ;-) So here goes:

Christmas Eve dinner at my house with mom and dad and Aunt Carolyn, who brought some wonderful fresh shrimp up from Pensacola. So we had shrimp scampi and steaks - not very traditional, but really, really good!

Then we had Christmas Morning at our house with the same crowd and Anna was up to her usual silliness.

Opening stockings... Santa even remembered Mandy this year. :-)


Later in the day, we went over to mom and dad's house to open a few more gifts there and have Christmas dinner. The girls got cameras and were very happy about that!



On Friday, we headed down to the lake to spend a couple of days with Jack's family. It was so warm on Friday afternoon, that we were able to sit (or snooze!) out on the screened porch and even go for a ride in the boat!

Mackenzie may LOOK like she's putting together a puzzle, but most of the time she was using her Christmas present - texting! :-)

So this is a picture of the lake house.... HAHAHAHAHAHA...... ok, it's the picture of the house across the lake from us that we always pass as we go out on the boat and WISH that we could just go inside and see what it looks like. I just thought it was a pretty cool picture.... ;-)

It was a little chilly on the front of the boat....

And oh, probably the most fun we had was with this new little addition to the family - a little fur-ball named Hunter. He's very, very cute... and we have no idea what he is. Deb wanted anything BUT a beagle -- but after looking at him and hearing him bark, we're pretty sure that he's got a good bit of beagle in him. :-)

No, you can't bring him home with us, Anna.

We drove home from the lake on Saturday night and went straight to my uncle's house for the yearly 'Townsley Christmas' get-together. I started to say 'dinner' but we went from it being a dinner to just being dessert several years ago when our families kept expanding. ha That was a fun evening. My uncle has a pool table, a ping-pong table and several old arcade games in his basement. This is why I don't have any pictures -- I was too busy playing! :-)

My sister and her family arrived in town that night. This picture is before our Christmas present to each other... a night out on the town. We were supposed to go to Chef's Table and were really looking forward to it until we realized they are closed on Monday nights... oops. So we ended up at Carrabas instead - which was still a lot of fun.

My sister left on Wednesday, so we had a quiet New Year's Eve and a couple days to pack up Christmas around the house before we went on our wild adventure to Illinois for Brady and Shanna's wedding. And that about sums up Christmas 2008. It's been kinda nice to get back to a little bit of 'normal' today - but a little lonely, too. It was nice having everyone around.