Back to Real Life in the New Year

What a fun holiday we had!  Rhonda stayed with us through New Year's Day, and we enjoyed a New Year's Eve progressive dinner with our Wednesday night prayer group.  We had appetizers at Steve and Heather's house--Heather is an AMAZING chef, having gone to culinary school and not being afraid to experiment with various tastes.  We were treated to some fabulous appetizers, served on fancy platters, and had to be careful not to fill up before the next course, which was soup and salad at Milt and Virginia's.  Another good course, followed by dessert at Shirley and Bruce's house.  I did contribute a "Decadent Peanut Butter Pie," and Shirley's eclair was WONDERFUL!  I was good and only had half slices of each.  This year one of my resolutions is to break my sugar addiction and to greatly reduce my consumption of sugar--which means no desserts for quite a long time!  I've been fairly good so far, but I did have a leftover eclair on New Year's Day...other than that, two days sugar free, LOL.

Thursday morning I woke up with my neck cranked around in a weird position, and I've been in pain ever since.  I've made two trips to see my chiropractor, which has helped, but I think it will be another couple of days before I can move normally.  Very frustrating...especially since another resolution was to get back into a regular exercise routine, which hasn't really happened since we went on our American vacation in September.  Sigh.  Soon, my P90X DVDs, soon!!

New Year's evening we went to Scott and Eilene's house for a night of Catan and, of course, good food.  Eilene made a big pot of rice, and I brought chicken in orange sauce, while she fixed a sausage/bean type dish.  Both were very yummy!  Ted ended up bringing Lucan home and putting him to bed while Charis watched a couple of Little House episodes and babysat.  It's hard to believe we are at that point now!  Soon she'll be able to watch all the kids with us being farther away than just a couple of houses down the street!

Sunday we enjoyed a day of rest after beginning a new class:  Resolve to Read 2011.  For a number of years Ted and I have read through the Bible during the course of a year, but we haven't really been part of a class or discussion group with it.  We're using an NIV Chronological Bible, which I think will really be fun.  We try to vary our readings with different versions, so this will shake it up a bit.  Last year I read through the archaeological study Bible that we had given Ted for Father's Day a couple of years previously.  I loved the cultural and historical notes throughout!

Ted was off work again today, so I zipped to the commissary and enjoyed the early bird shopping hours, then delivered a meal on the way to my chiropractor appointment.  I don't know if I've blogged yet about the Kitchen Kindness ministry at our church...I think I've THOUGHT about blogging about it, but probably haven't actually done it.  Anyway, the short version of the story is that I am now the coordinator for this new ministry, and it's been really amazing to see how God led me to do this and how He has been working through it.  I'll try to write more about it later, but anyway, it was a blessing to serve one of our own Kitchen Kindness volunteers today.

Meanwhile, here at home, Ted had the kids start on some school work, and then we all put away groceries and had lunch before working to "un-decorate" before doing some school reading in the afternoon.  Lucan babbled for quite awhile before finally falling asleep for his nap--he didn't nap at all yesterday, and we suspect he is teething again.  He has been rather cranky the past couple of days and hasn't slept very well at night, either.

Now I have crunchy cracked wheat bread in the bread maker and some buttermilk bran muffins in the oven.  It's nice to get back in the kitchen again--last week I set up some pretty easy meals and didn't really do any baking at all other than a couple of loaves of bread for the family's lunches.  Tonight's meal is panceit using some chicken and broth that I cooked and prepared a couple of weeks ago, so it should come together quickly, and then I am looking forward to meeting with my neighborhood ladies' Bible study group. 

Tomorrow, it's back to the REAL schedule!  Ted heads back to work, and the kids and I will be here all day for school and Charis's piano lesson!  Vacation was fun while it lasted, and this year, though I'm looking forward to our regular routine again, I actually do feel sad that we don't have more holiday time.  With not traveling this year, we really didn't have anything stressful going on, and our time together was truly relaxing!  Ah, well.  Guess we'll look forward to the weekend!