January Wrap-Up

What a beautiful January we are having! I guess I love it because it reminds me of my childhood winters. There have been some extremely cold temperatures and some heavy snowfalls, which only means we throw more wood on the fire - and how thankful we are for the wood stove and furnace!
It snowed overnight and I took these pictures this morning. I always love to see a new blanket of untouched snow!

I have really been enjoying some spare time in the past few weeks. There hasn't been much going on, so I can putter away without feeling too guilty! I always have a jigsaw puzzle on the go and I have been keeping my brain active with Scrabble on the computer as well as a book of logic puzzles that I found, which really stretch my brain muscles! I have worked on organizing books and papers in the den, which is a never-ending job, and I am in the process of dealing with old photographs. I am putting some of the photos in scrapbooks, but there are some which are not really worthy of scapbooking, but still need to be saved. I bought new photo albums for those ones, but I need to put them on mats to make them fit in the albums, and then write a bit of commentary for each one. It sometimes looks like a never-ending job, too, but eventually I will catch up to our digital photos, where I can print only the photos that I wish to have. So, I am quite happy working on my little projects and keeping the house running smoothly.

Here we are at the evening meal on Sunday, with our girls and their families, and Byron and Ruth. It wasn't any special occasion, just the one month mark since Christmas Day, and it was really nice to be all together again.

In the above picture, from left to right, you see Amy, her husband Rudi, Jen, her daughter Maeve, me, Byron, Ruth, and Jen's husband Rich.

Because Jen was working the next day, Maeve stayed overnight with us. It turned out that she stayed two nights, and we had a lot of fun together. I hadn't kept her for quite some time, and I see how she is growing up in many ways, especially in how she carries on conversations so intelligently, and has creative ways of expressing herself. When we were having lunch, she said "What could we talk about?" I said, "I heard that you and Mummy made a snow tunnel at your house." Again she asked what could we talk about, and I said "I thought you might tell me about your snow tunnel." She said "I didn't, because there is nothing else" (to say about it, I guess), and that was the end of it! She loves playing 'going in the car', buying groceries with her toy cash register and putting all her babies to bed. She still wants me to play with her although she will play on her own too. I am so happy to be her Gramma!