'Twas the day after Christmas...

Hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas!!  We did, in spite of the cold pouring rain.  I was still barefoot and in shorts most of the day anyway.  AND I got a nap on Christmas afternoon.  Life was goooooood.  

Here are a few pics from our weekend!

Daddy's delicious homemade chili that we had Christmas Eve with hot dogs.  It's a tradition we've started and that chili gets better and better every year!  This year he put ground chicken in it, too, and that was my favorite part.  It was SO good!!!!

 

Mama roasted pecans, too.  Yum!!!

 

Goodies on the bar.

We had two kinds of cake, cookies, Mama's Martha Washington candy, fudge, peanut butter buckeyes, the chess bars I brought and some banana nut bread that one of my neighbors made for me.  (And Maw was with us, too!)  My mama does not mess around when it comes to Christmas.  She makes these goodies for us every year, she cooks a huge meal and pretty much works herself to exhaustion seeing that we have everything that we could possibly want and whatever else she can dream up in that sweet head of hers.  Here she is on Christmas morning making my hot chocolate:

 

Daddy got us these little snowman marshmallows.

SOOOO cute!!

One side of the tree full of presents.

 Here's Daddy wearing his furry warm 

hat that Ami and Brian gave him!

Mama, Audra and Ami

It's SO funny that they're all holding a camera!

Sweet Brian, just chillin' with the stockings.

This beloved boy WON a camera for me for Christmas!!  Ami told me last week that they had a magical Santa surprise for me and I had NO IDEA what it could be.  They gave me this envelope Christmas Eve with this card inside telling me about the camera and that I'll get it sometime next month!  It's a Sony Cyber-shot and I am SO excited!!!

 These were my presents from Larry

Brian took this one of me when I opened my 

Beatles Yellow Submarine shower curtain from Larry 

and then realized what it was!  :)

 It is such a bright, happy and BEAUTIFUL yellow!

I absolutely love it!!  I told Larry today that I want to redo the bathroom in the Yellow Submarine theme, rugs, towels and a replica of the album on the wall.

 What Santa left in my stocking, 

along with some Bath and Body Works shower gels, 

paint brushes and flux brushes. 

My swag (as Larry calls it!)

From Mama and Daddy:  Poofies, Bath and Body Works shower gels in Cherry Blossom and Black Raspberry Vanilla, Philosophy Amazing Grace 3-in-1 shower gel, shampoo and bubble bath (my very favorite!!!), a voltage detector (It is SO COOL!!!  It will be so helpful finding shorts in circuits!  I walked around the house with it last night checking all kinds of stuff for shorts. Ha!), a lavender soy candle, a tub of flux and flux brushes for soldering, The Very Best of Dwight Yoakam CD (that is just awesome!!  I listened to it today.  I love it.), some paint brushes and two Wilton cake pans that are very much needed!  Mine are so raggedy.  Mama has made about a billion cakes in her life and she always used Wilton pans and products, they're the best money can buy.  So that's what she got me.

From Ami and Brian:  a beautiful set of black silky pajamas and the softest black and gray plaid scarf.  And The Camera!!!

My Aunt Elizabeth gave me the book, We Bought A Zoo.  I can't wait to get started on it!

Larry got me these.  The Yellow Submarine shower curtain, my tambourine (yay!!!), a super nice Mercer Millenia chef's knife (with a finger guard, my baby knows me and loves me!  Ha!), four olive wood spoons from Crate and Barrel and Berard (I LOVELOVELOVE wooden spoons!  I don't like molded plastic anything so I do a lot of my cooking with bamboo spoons.  I have never even SEEN spoons as nice as these!!), the coolest inflatable snake scarecrow to keep the critters off my strawberries and 'maters next year, a super cool Belkin Conserve Insight, which tells you how much electricity your appliances and things are using, what they're costing you and the CO2 (carbon dioxide) you're generating.  I played with this thing last night and I was absolutely AMAZED at what it told me!!  My Christmas lights, for example, produce 86 pounds of CO2, cost me $8.25 per day and use 99 watts of electricity.  My landline telephone on the other hand, produces only 13.7 pounds of CO2, costs me $1.31 per day and only uses 1.2 watts of electricity.  No wonder everybody's light bill is sky high in January!!  He also got me a stuffed Angry Birds plush doll simply because he liked it.  Neither of us play Angry Birds.  :)  The gift that made me cry was the flannel shirt.  He picks out these things for me from magazines and catalogs he sees during the year, saving ads here and there for things he likes.  Then at Christmas (or our anniversary and my birthday), he'll send the money to Ami and she orders the stuff for me.  She always wraps everything so beautifully and she's so sweet to help him with my presents.  She sends him the gift tags and he fills them out and sends them back to her.  They've been doing this for so long that it's like a perfectly choreographed dance.  Okay, back to the shirt.  Waaaaaay back in the day, when my baby was free, he wore a lot of flannel shirts in the winter.  He wanted me to have one as if it was his, big, oversized and long, 'cause he's a tall boy.  He even picked out the colors, reds and blues.  He also wanted it washed and soft so that I could just put it on.  And that I did.  I LOVE it but what I love most is his sweet, romantic little soul.  He is forever thinking of ways to show me that he loves me, even though I know he adores me just as I adore him.  I just don't know what else to say about that except the Lord sho' knew what He was doing when He led me to Larry.  I know without a doubt that I was handpicked by God Himself to be Larry's wife.  I got a little irritated today in the visitation room (as I do quite frequently.  Ha!), because we had eavesdroppers.  I cannot STAND that.  Lord, I wanted to slap somebody the day after Christmas.  The Baby Jesus was JUST BORN, for goodness' sake!!  When people discover how long we've been together, we become almost like celebrities to them.  They stare, watch our every move, want to get all in our business and ask me questions like, "How do you do it?".  How do I do WHAT??  Love my husband?  If I'd met Larry in a bookstore (which is my fantasy :)) in 1988, guess what?  We would still be together today.  The way we live our life is no different from any other couple and when we're having a private conversation, don't lean sideways and try to hear.  K??

Anyway, hope you all had the merriest of Christmases and are looking forward to fantastic 2012!!