I must first confess that I am writing these posts all the way in August of this year. I ended up getting overwhelmed with my volunteer project at Anna's school, training for the marathon, and just life in general. Then I got behind ont he blog and got overwhelmed. Then I had technical difficulties. Things piled up. I'm trying to get caught up again and will hopefully never get so far behind! Three more things: 1. I didn't take good notes during the time I wasn't keeping up on the blog. 2. I accidentally threw away the notes that I did take. 3. There are a few pictures missing from this post because my camera was on a different setting and didn't produce a .cr2 image, only the .jpg and when I go to edit pictures I always delete all of the .jpgs so I can just work with the .cr2 images. Of course, I didn't realize when I did this that I didn't have .jpgs for the first few images for the month of January. I'm very sad about this! I'm just glad it was only one day's worth of photos and not more.
I do plan to write these posts as if I don't know the future/as if I wrote them on the day they are posted since is how I have always written. (Back when I just had Anna I wrote daily during her nap or after she went to bed. When I had Sarah it was every couple of days, never more than a week late. After Henry I posted for the week every Sunday until we moved to Texas and then things fell apart and I have been on a continuous falling behind/catching up routine. I love having the printed books to look at so that is my motivation to catching up right now!)
We had a bit more relaxed hors d'oeuvres party this year. Since we planned to get back on the first, I bought a bunch of frozen appetizers and we just heated them up. I bought everyone fancy hats (not pictured, see note above) and we had holiday crackers again. We were all just so glad to be home and not driving any more!
