Family Alive

Crazy girl!  Princess shoes, pink tutu not exactly matching the red jacket, wand, racing back and forth down the sidewalk with her streamers flying.  Anyone doubt that she’s got Brian’s genes in her?

Moments later, she decided to ride down the short steep hill of our driveway, and we experienced our first crash.  She cried and cried and cried over her scraped knee, got pudding and an Angelina Ballerina movie instead of dinner with lots of snuggling.  The next day, I realized she had a big bruise on her shin, poor girl, in addition to the little scrape.  Of course, she was back riding down the hill yesterday. 

Brian came home while we were out playing that evening.  He’s modeling his new awesome reflective winter cycling jacket which he won in the inaugural month of a Saturday race ride here in Birmingham. 

And we’ve not told you about his new bike!  He’s got a brand-spankin’-new Trek Madone 5.5, which he calls The Hornet because of its flashy paintjob.  Trek offered the entire team the bikes at cost, so it was an amazing deal.   (Anyone want to buy 2-year old Trek Madone with more miles than we care to mention??)  He loves the new bike.  He’s hoping to post a blog soon called "The State of the Bikes". 
And two other biking tidbits… He’s been upgraded to Category 1/ elite.  Woohoo!  Now he won’t have to petition to get into the big races.  And his response to the crazy angry bike article was printed by the Huntsville Times, and you can see it here. 

I’ll leave you with a glimpse of our Christmas lights.  Those are twinkling snowflakes hanging down.  As I’ve said in previous years, before kids, I thought that less was more when it came to Christmas lights.  But now that my sweeties ooh and ahh over everything, and we have to pull over to enjoy the biggest, gaudiest Christmas decorations, I don’t think that there’s such a thing as too much 🙂  Unless, of course, we’re paying the electric bill!  Tom put these lights up for us, and the next day, he added to it by giving us his beautiful, extensive wood nativity set.  Needless to say, Analise is ecstatic that Baby Jesus is in her front yard.  We have to go check on him every time we come home.  I’ll post pictures soon!

Lest you think I’m totally on the ball with the Christmas cookies, decorations, lights, etc, I’m not.  The tree is up, but the kids are daily un-decorating it, the boxes are still in the living room, only a few decorations are out, and I’m only about 50% done with my Christmas shopping.  And the artsy-crafty Christmas cards haven’t been touched in a while.  Time to get on the ball!  But the Christmas spirit abounds here!