I love Christmas, its my favorite holiday in the whole wide world and now that Adele is here we're trying to build our own traditions and make sure that she gets to enjoy and partake in most parts of the season. I love the holidays...except family changes everything. We split Thanksgiving and we're going to split Christmas, since our families only live 2 hours apart but we've decided this is it. When we're home for Christmas we're going to tell the families that starting in '09 we're going to start rotating. Christmas with one side, Thanksgiving with the other. MIL called me the other day and chewed me out for planning something on their half of our Christmas visit and that was the straw that broke my back after putting up with 6+ years of this crap. She made the comment to a friend over Thanksgiving, with me standing right there, that she hoped once BIL got married we would rotate holidays, so we're just going to accelerate that a few years. Both sides have talked about doing ski vacations instead of gifts and that would be very hard if we were trying to split the holiday so this will be better for everyone. We'll see how MIL takes it. My only condition is that in '09 we do Thanksgiving with my side and Christmas with his because my sister rotates and if we can't rotate with her I won't rotate at all. So we'll see how it goes, hopefully its not a big fight.
Thanksgiving was nice though rushed. I got to see my new little niece. Adele was hillarious, she was fine as long as anyone held her except my dad. As soon as he picked the baby up she was NOT happy. Its so funny how she picked up on that. We drove back in some treacherous weather on Sunday, DH was stressed but we managed. Hopefully the Christmas travel weather is better.
We got some great pictures of Adele over the holidays, there are a lot on her blog. We got together one Saturday with 3 of DH's buddies that all also had kids this year. Adele is the oldest and it was a riot. She didn't really seem to know what to think about all of them and they didn't seem to know what to do about her and all of her moving, it was a lot of fun.
DH has added one to his list of fellowship locations. Cleveland. So now we're at Cleveland, Cincinnati, Portland, Houston and Tampa. He just finished a grant application and has been busy with resident interviews so hopefully before Christmas he'll have a chance to get a draft letter of intent put together so his mentor here can review it and he can start contacting programs after the 1st of the year.
So Adele is up, will post more later.