Thursday, January 5th - a very belated Happy New Year to everyone!

It's been a busy few days at our house and things like blogs have had to take a back seat. James arrived around supper time on the 28th and Patti and the others arrived in the afternoon on the 1st.

"What looks good in the third race?"

Lloyd, James and I decided to spend New Years Eve at the races. Of course James isn't old enough to bet but he had some money that Lloyd could bet for him. I gave each of them $20.00 at the beginning of the evening and that was to be their limit, as was mine. We didn't make any money but the up side is we all came home with over half of our original $20.00 so it was all good.

Patti and the other two kids arrived on New Years Day. Greg had to be back at work on the 3rd so it would have been such a short visit as to not be worthwhile, so he stayed home and dog sat. The first order of business of course, was opening presents. I had made some fleece pajamas for James, which he wore the entire week, sometimes all day. I'd also made a chef's jacket and pants for Tristen, our budding young cook. He was quite pleased. Meg's gift was meant to be a gift card for one of her favorite stores in Ontario, but I forgot to remind Patti to pick it up. So instead she got cash, and she was quite happy with that.

Making meatballs for our guests

We had invited Lloyd's sister Heather and her family over on the 2nd so Patti spent her first full day here helping in the kitchen. And a good thing she was here, or I never would have gotten everything done in time. Of course Tristen helped as well.

On the 3rd (Tuesday) we went into town. We dropped the boys  and Patti at the pool while Meg and I went to the movies. We saw a kids movie called "Sing". When asked how I enjoyed it, my only response was any movie that opens and closes with a Beatles tune is alright in my books!

We spent pretty much the whole day on Wednesday in the kitchen. Tristen and I were very busy quite early in the day. We made pasta dough for pasta later on. We made pie pastry for lemon meringue pie, a favorite of both Papa and James. We made two batches of Monkey Bread (we were sure one batch wasn't going to turn out, but in the end it did) and Tristen also wanted to make potato chips.

Assembling the dough balls for the monkey bread

Rolling out the pie pastry

Deep frying the potato chips

Sampling the baked monkey bread - mmmm tasty!

Rolling out the pasta dough

It took most of the day but we completed all our projects. We had a great day in the kitchen. Of course, there was no shortage of samplers. We even invited Brenda to come over and have tea as there was no school due to the miserable weather.







Perhaps the biggest hit of the visit was Pumpkin. I don't think his feet spent very much time on the floor. If you wanted to find Meghan you looked for Pumpkin. If you wanted to find Pumpkin, you looked for Meg. The rest of the time he was with Tristen.

Tristen enjoyed his morning and evening chores, feeding the goats and chickens and collecting the eggs every morning.

James has it in his mind he'd like to try his hand a building a computer from scratch. He and Lloyd spent quite a bit of time discussing what might be needed and where said part might be obtained.

Two geeks at work

Help with the dishes is ALWAYS appreciated although Patti did way more than her fair share!

Nightly monopoly games were better than sitting in front of the TV

James has a speed skating meet this weekend so they need to get home, but unfortunately all the flights seem to be sold out. As a result, we are heading to Moncton this afternoon. It appears they may have a good chance of getting on from there so we're heading out around lunch time. There are at least two flights later this afternoon so hopefully they can get everyone home today.