We wish you a merry Christmas and what? It's a new year?!

Thought I'd put up another post to let you know we're all still living.

Interesting Christmas time this year. Sarah's younger sister decided she wanted to come and see the joy that is Texas, so we had her come hang with us for a week. It was fun to have her here. We're trying to get her to move to Texas, where school teachers get paid about twice what they do in Utah, but it's a slow process. She likes Orem too much. We also had one of our friends who had recently moved away come back and stay with us. She was Sarah's one and only student in Sunday School when we first moved into our house.
We usually head down to Sarah's brother's house for Christmas, but with two other people with us it would have been a tight fit in their house. So we utilized our condo in New Braunfels, which is about 45 minutes to an hour away (depending on who's driving) from their house and were able to relax there. Okay, try to relax. We found out that our friend has night terrors and sleepwalks when she's not in a familiar environment. Also, it is the wrong thing to do if anyone touches her when she's sleepwalking or having a bad dream. We were worried she was going to flee the premises and go walking around our condo's neighborhood, so we had to move chairs in front of the doors. Sarah, being the caring person she is, even slept on the couch to make sure she didn't take off. That kept us up most of Christmas Eve. We found her snuggled against our door in the morning.

Since we were all tired, we didn't make it to Sarah's brother's house until about 2pm. The kids went ahead and did their presents without us, which was fine, but we didn't have any of the traditional Christmas morning feel to the day. It was more just like a Saturday where we were REALLY tired!

We did have a really special experience when we were there, so it wasn't all weird. Our oldest niece, who turned eight in November was baptized. This was a special experience because one, it was a baptism and two, Victoria has cerebral palsy. She is very functional and really understands what is going on. She called and asked Sarah and I to participate in the baptism, Sarah giving a talk about being baptized and I was asked to pray and lead the music. My nephew decided on the closing song that he needed to help me lead and came up to the front to help out Uncle Wade. It was fun.

We were able to go get ourselves some Christmas presents (thanks Mom!) during our time down there too. There is a stretch of 3 outlet malls about 20 minutes away from our condo (think the factory stores in Park City on steroids), so we went and did some shopping. We were able to get Sarah some cute clothes (though since she hates pictures, they will not be appearing on this blog) and she even found a discount on some decent merchandise.


For New Years Eve, we chaperoned a youth dance. It was really boring. With the ample amount of chaperons there, we decided we weren't needed and left at 12:01am (we figured we'd stay until the year expired). This was the first time in our married life we have been awake to welcome in the new year. Why start off the year tired?

So that's what's been going down that isn't incredibly boring. May your new year be better for you than all the other years you've lived!