It's so good to be back in Denver!

Well we're home :-) The drive wasn't too bad, just under 13 hours. And we even took 30 minutes for lunch. Jackson did great, he slept the whole time as usual. When we got home, around 6:30, our roommate had dinner cooking! That was a wonderful surprise since we certainly didn't want to get back into the car to get dinner and neither of us felt like cooking after getting up at 5am that morning. While Paul finished cooking, we unloaded the car. This was quite a treacherous task because there was about an inch of ice covering our driveway. I can't believe we fit everything in our car! We got so many Christmas presents early because they were big and we couldn't fly with them. We just piled everything inside and then ate dinner. Paul had to go to work (he deals poker for corporate Christmas parties and stuff like that) so Daniel and I cleaned up dinner. Then we got to start opening up our gifts! We hung our mezuzah on our front door (it's a Jewish tradition). Then we opened up our nativity and set that up. We are a truly multi-cultural family! We opened up all our Christmas presents and reorganized our kitchen a little bit so it would all fit. And finally we unwrapped our rug and put it in the living room. It looks so nice! We poured ourselves a glass of wine and lit the Hanukkah candles. Before bed, we started a load of laundry. It was a very productive evening.

So now we're back home and I am so happy. We were pretty cramped in a tiny guest room at my parents, so it's nice to have a closet and a big bed and our own bathroom now. Jackson has settled in nicely as well, he's been sleeping all day. We still have a lot to do in the next five days before we go to Las Vegas. We have to clear out an entire room full of stuff for Hope to move in, and move some of our storage around. This will be more difficult because Paul has a friend staying in our guest room which also happens to be a lot of our storage area. But that's okay, we'll make it work. We have 2 1/2 weeks worth of mail to go through, and we have to prepare for Eric to move in. A bunch of his furniture will be arriving by mail in the next week. On top of that, Daniel's birthday is on Tuesday and we're going to have a party here! Many of our friends are back from studying abroad so it will be so nice to see them after 6 months. Most of them are over 21, so I think we'll probably be going out that night. I'm going to bake a cake for Daniel in my new kitchenaid mixer! I can't wait. We also have to go grocery shopping because there is no food left in the house. On top of all that, Daniel wants to get a few good days of skiing in. He went up to the mountains today and skiied for about 3 hours. That's all he could handle because it was a brisk 0 degrees today. The weather warmed up down here on the front range today; it's a beautiful 50 right now. It's kind of funny to go outside and feel the warm weather, but there's still a good inch or two of snow on the ground. I guess that's Denver! It should melt fast as long as the weather stays like this. Oh, and we have to pack for Las Vegas/ Christmas in Phoenix/ California family reunion/ Cruise to Mexico. I'm having a hard time figuring out what to wear. I need a dress for 1) Vegas, 2) Christmas Eve, 3) One night in California, and 4) 3 nights on the cruise including New Years. Of course I can double up on a couple of those. I can't believe my winter break isn't even half over! I'm loving it :-)