Winter Wonderland

I hope everyone had as lovely a Christmas as I did. I spent Christmas eve at the house of dear friends and then had the family and friends over for Christmas day dinner. I was so glad my cousins were able to make it in from Iowa for the holiday. It was a lot of fun, we had about 14 people over and we all ate a lot and played "pass the baby" with my unbelieveably adorable new nephew. I especially enjoyed making the 20-something year old men in attendance hold him. They always look so uncomfortable doing it. All the girls love holding the baby though, and he's all smiley and giggly and has that nice baby smell. He thought the huskies were very funny and would smile and laugh at them when they walked by. Little ones are so great at Christmas. My friend's Great Niece, who's around 4, and I had this conversation on Christmas Eve about a stuffed animal reindeer that was on the couch we were sitting on:

Me - "Wow, this reindeer has ear muffs, a snowball and ice skates. He's got a lot going on, don't you think?"
Nora (giggling hysterically) - "Reindeers don't skate! Reindeers fly!"
Ah, the voice of authority. She totally cracked me up.

I had a TON of projects due by Christmas, which is why I haven't posted in quite a while. I made 2 twin quilts, 4 pillowcases, 3 grocery bags, 2 dish towels and a long table runner. I had pictures of them all that I took at 2:45am Weds morning when I finished them up, but I somehow managed to delete them from my SD card just now. I'm going to have to ask the Secret Squirrel IT guys at my day job if there's anyway to get them back. There was a darling photo I took of our new Husky, Magic, at 3am Christmas morning. I made the mistake of giving the canines water too late in the evening and they were up prancing about at 3am. I was waiting for Robbie to come back in when Magic laid down under the Christmas stockings to wait with me. It was so cute, he looked like he was waiting for Santa!

Given all of the quilting projects that I finished between the first weekend in October and December 22nd, it's a miracle I got dinner on the table Christmas day, much less the tree up, but thanks to help from my wonderful sister and the hubby, we got most of it done. I tried some new recipes this time, most of them were keepers. A couple need some tweeking. I made a horseradish cream from a Nordstroms cookbook that was out of this world. I also tried a different ice cream base recipe for my holiday spice tea ice cream. These two were definitely keepers.

I've spent the last 2 days doing dishes and laundry and vegging in front of Mama Mia and other chick movies while enjoying the winter wonderland weather we have been having. It's been snowing since Christmas night, we probably have 8 inches or more by now. The huskies can't get enough of it. Beaner just goes out there and lays down in it for hours. Even Abbie, my old girl, is energized by it. Beaner and Magic wrestle and chase each other around for hours, stopping only to eat some snow.

I have some photos of the snow and various Christmas items, but blogger won't upload anything just now, so my post will just have to be photoless today. It seems I have some bad photo karma going on this weekend.
I'm off to attempt to put some order back in my sewing room.