Christmas Almost Here...

We are busy at our house getting ready for the holiday. I am busy making gifts in the evenings and am enjoying some craft-time with my good friend, Lane. We are both gift-makers and enjoy the time to knit, sew, decoupage' and chat. I bought a couple of sewing patterns from etsy.com setters and hope to put a few of them together in these last days. Maybe I'll get really organized and take some pictures and post them of my creations. We are also doing some baking- nothing too ambitious but certainly delicious cocoa cookies and also roasted spicy mixed nuts.

Eric had a successful trip to Denver to work with his old boss and friend, DJ. It went well for them and despite missing him a bunch, we did fine and it was a worthwhile trip. We hope to travel down there together in March and spend a little time in Moab, Utah, but it's up in the air. Eric is likely to make at least one more trip down there to work this winter and while we miss him and I miss my chore and kid partner, it's helping us keep chugging along, so that's what we do.

Speaking of traveling, we are soon to see Eric's brother and sister-in-law, Matt & Brigid, and their 3 lovelies in 2 weeks and Eric and I are counting the days. They are a great family and we have missed them a great deal since they moved out to Seattle and we hope they will stay with us for a little while during their stay. I might get to see them again later this winter as I have a Washington/Northern California trip in the planning stages with my dad to visit more family and I'm pretty excited about that because it will be the first trip out west for me as a student pilot and co-pilot in the mountains.

School is going really well and I'm so excited about what we are doing. Some ideas are forming about goals for the next couple years, but they are still formative so I'll keep them between myself and Eric for now. But I am trying to think about business names and websites and other marketing material to get in order before the winter gets too late. I'll be buying seeds and other supplies in the next couple weeks to prepare, and getting other plans ready.

Leo is doing really well and is growing up in so may ways. He knows about Santa Claus for the first time and after some debate we decided St Nick would be making a stop at our house this year. We will be having a Solstice Celebration tonight including a small fire outside, marshmallow roasting, and then making and decorating inside with paper snowflakes after. He is on the cusp of recognizing individual letters and numbers, not quite there but close and loves to help us with all sorts of things around the house. We are in the midst of putting up shelving units in our office/sewing room and he is right in the thick of it, wanting to hand Eric tools or plug in the drill. He also recently started refusing to flush the toilet unless we hold the tank lid open for him so he can pull the lever inside to flush and watch how it works. He's pretty savvy, that one. He's dry at night, now and I'm strangely sad to put all my well-loved cloth diapers away until...well, sometime in the future. My niece Angela had a lovely baby boy a couple weeks ago and is doing well. Leo is at an age where he's really into babies and it's fun and sweet to watch him.

That's about it for the family update for now.
Happy Solstice & Merry Christmas,
Ellen, Eric & Leo