Fa La La La La

The Christmas rush is over! The packages have been wrapped and unwrapped.

The cookies and fudge made and (almost) all eaten.

The parties are over.....

Phew! I'm really looking forward to some time where there is nothing to cook and clean for! Seems like that is all I have done for the last 2 months

Whatever will I do with myself?????

December has been a really busy month!

This is the last quilt I finished up before Christmas:

And here are a couple of shirts that I embroidered:

This one was made for Tana's birthday! I went on-line to look for cute sayings and found this one. It seemed to fit the occasion very nicely since she is entering her 60th year and did indeed live thru the 1960's! Tana and I walked in the Susan B Koman Breast Cancer 60 mile walk a few years ago. Tana walked again this year! She is pretty amazing.

This is a Christmas shirt I made for ME!

Rafael is my model!

Poor guy.........he was over painting a picture to give to Jenny as a Christmas gift....and what do I do?

A group of friends met up at Caramba's to celebrate Tana's 60th birthday!

That was a fun night!

I also had Christmas Bunko and quilt meetings.

Here is a group shot with Chips at Cheryl's house.

We had a great potluck supper (My favorite ) and exchanged gifts.

I don't know quite how this happened but I failed to get even one picture at Bunko!

We met up at Kathy's house and FEASTED on a great meal from Bobby-Q's.

We played Bunko and also LRC. I was just seconds away from being the

big winner at LRC, but as luck would have it I rolled the

dice and Tana became the winner!

Better luck next time!

We failed to get a group shot of the Friday Night Quilters, but we had a delicious dinner prepared by Linda and then exchanged quilty gifts. Lots of fun there too! We exchange gifts by playing the stealing game. In one picture below you will see Kathy attempting to keep someone from stealing the gift she just opened by "marking" it! She wasn't successful!

Hurray! My computer is fixed!

My husband is a genius! Finally got my computer back on track. Seems to have been attacked by some sort of virus. Yuck.........why do people have to do that?

This is a picture of my lovely family. This was about 1/2 hour before I had over 23 women arriving for my annual ornament exchange. These people pictured above worked thier fingers to the bone (well almost) putting up Christmas decorations, the Christmas tree, cooking, hanging outside lights, etc, etc.

I can't thank them enough..........I am so lucky to have them!

I just don't know what I would do without them!

Ornament Exchange pictures:

We had drinks on the back porch.

Jen had set up and beautifully decorated these tables.




Quite a line formed in the kitchen to fill up our plates.

Jenny had fixed a turkey earlier in the day.

I added some gravy and stuffing and my friends all brought potluck!

We had quite a feast!

We push all the furniture back so we can all eat family style:

After we stuff ourselves with great food we remove the tables and form a large circle around the room so we can "exchange" ornaments. It never fails to move me when I look around that circle of friends. Not a day goes by that I don't stop and thank God for so richly blessing me!

This year we added a game called Left, Right, Center:

On of the many highlights of the evening for me was when my daughter-in-law went to "steal" an ornament from my friend Jo, who remarked (trying to dissuade Jen from stealing her ornament) "Jen, you used to be such a sweet girl" To which Jen's mom replied "Yeah, until she started hanging around with the Baldi's"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's true..........we've corrupted her!