Wrapping it up

Wednesday was my birthday and Rae had ballet class in Columbia. Roy had to give finals all day, so he was stuck at work while we went and had fun. First we went to Bass Pro to see Santa.


The photographer kept insisting he "smile bigger" so his face ended up like this.



Rae had ballet and then we went to Chevy's for my birthday lunch. Yum! I can't remember what we did after that - probably some shopping or something.
The rest of the week we did a lot of this:








On Saturday we drove to Kansas City to take the Mapels back to the airport. We stopped at Union Station where I knew they were doing train rides with Santa, but I didn't realize it would be SUPER crowded. So we just looked at the model train exhibit and rode a mini-train instead. Then we tried going to a mall to look around but forgot that it was the last Saturday before Christmas - so that was way too crowded too. We wrapped up the trip by eating out one more time and then dropped the Mapels off at the airport. It was a fun visit - thanks for coming you guys!

And more

On Tuesday the 14th Roy went to work for the morning and the rest of us just hung out. We picked him up from work and went to a little museum on campus. Everyone got up close and personal with the dead animals.





Then we went home and had a nice turkey dinner with all the fixin's.






Then we opened presents.

More of Mapel visit

Saturday after getting the tree we headed home and got cleaned up for our branch Christmas party. We had a tasty dinner and the primary kids put on a cute presentation. It was nice that we got to visit with everyone because that night it snowed church was canceled the next day. We got up and had a nice breakfast, played in the snow, and decorated the tree. Since the tree was decorated the kids thought it was time to open presents, so we let them open their stockings and one present, but wanted to save the rest for later in the week. Again, the pictures speak for themselves.