Hello!

It has been entirely too long since I have posted, so I'll try to get caught up without being too boring! I am lying in bed at 9:30 on Friday night (isn't wireless wonderful!) next to my husband who is sawing some serious logs! My goodness our Friday nights are wild and crazy these days!

So, Christmas has come and gone. It was wonderful, but boy am I glad to get back to boring every day life! The weekend before Christmas, we had Chris' mom, step dad, sister and brother in law stay with us for a few days. So we did our Christmas with them and also had his step brothers and their wives over. Then went into Greensboro to have the big family Christmas with his mom's family that Sunday. I have to give huge props to the white elephant this year. In years past, we have had to buy gifts for everyone and it is an utter nightmare. We have resorted to really puny giftcards for the past few years and we come home with some terrible dollar store junk. This year the powers that be in the family finalyl decided to do the white elephant gift exchange and it was fabulous. We still came home with a cheese ball talking Santa, but we will be bringing it back next year. I guess my point is that it shouldn't be ultra stressful to buy gifts since that shouldnt' be the focus of the gathering.

We went to Christmas Eve service, which was just lovely...after Chris took Meredith out and let her run wild in the nursery. I was hoping she would really love all of the music etc of the service, but she just couldn't sit still. She looked just adorable in her beautiful dress and I might even say angelic if you could have gotten her to sit still long enough. I hear this sitting still thing might happen one day....

We did a small family Christmas with just Chris, Meredith and I that morning. Her big gift was an awesome pink tricycle and she was so cute when she saw it. She jumped right on and thought it was pretty cool. Then we went to my parents house for breakfast and stockings. Then we went over to Chris's step-sisters house to have the Elliott Christmas. I thought it was going to be nuts because there are so many kids, but there is also divorce in almost every family, so most of the kids were already off to see their daddys by the time we got over there...interesting stuff on that side of the family :) Meredith got some good time with her great grandparents and her other Nana & Papaw.

Between Christmas Eve and Christmas day, Meredith seemed to develop that cough that whwn you hear it makes you say, "Oh my goodness, that kid needs to go to the doctor!" It was that nasty croupy cough that sounds just terrible. It wasn't ER worthy, so we waited until 12/26 and called our pediatrician and went to their urgent care office in Wake Forest. The doctor saw her for maybe a total of 2.5 minutes and gave us a prescription. The good thing was that Meredith never seemed very bothered by the cough and it disappeared quickly after she got the meds.

We had a short lull for about a day and a half after Christmas until my sister Elizabeth, her husand Chris and her two girls Abigail and Jessica arrived from Michigan. I was very fortunate to have the whole week of Christmas off and didn't go back to work until Jan 2. We had a great time with Elizabeth. Meredith had an even better time with her cousins. They were absolutely wild. We all went to the Angus Barn for dinner the first night and mom kept the girls (she swears she's rather babysit than go with us!). She said that Meredith kept making the other girls dance with her (dancing consists of jumping up and down and waving her arms for the most part!). If one sat down, she'd drag the other one up to dance. Mom said she was just like the energizer bunny. She did not sleep well at all that night and Mom was up with her several times, so we didn't do anymore slumber parties with her cousins after that night.

We did all kinds of fun stuff. We went to the NC Zoo in Asheboro one day. It was really quite warm and we had great views of lots of the animals. I hadn't been there in at least 10 years, if not more, and it was really nice and it wasn't crowded at all. We also did a wine tasting at this little winery right in the middle of RTP, Chatham Hill. We went to JCPenny for a cousin picture. They really do a great job there and all three girls were wonderful. We decided that we just need to stick them in front of a camera to behave! We went to Allison's boyfriend's restaurant one night, Casa Carbone. Unfortunately, restaurants just don't work with Meredith, so we left Casa Carbone early and we left our favorite Chinese restaurant (Imperial Garden) almost as soon as my food arrived. Meredith definitely had me pretty stressed out at times, but overall she just had a blast with her cousins. Side note: They did manage to bring a nasty northern stomach bug with them from Michigan that managed to work it's way through the entire family....thanks!

So, I think that at least covers Christmas. I know I forgot stuff, so I'll post more later. I have lots of new pictures from my awesome new camera that I'll post tomorrow. The camera was Chris and my present to eachother. Now I think it's time to go to sleep :)

Happy Birthday to my Dad & Joey Z!