Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

The day after Michael's clean MRI, he underwent eye surgery to try to help correct his inability to keep his eyes straight.  This is his third such surgery in the last two years.  Last time he had the surgery he was pretty miserable for about a week and a half afterwards.  This time around he was miserable the day of the surgery, but by the next day he was happy and doing just fine.  Another great blessing this Christmas season!

Michael has been anesthetized so many times we've long since lost count.  Nowadays they usually give him nitrous oxide (laughing gas) to put him to sleep before they tap into a vein and give him propofol to keep him asleep.  This week, one of the times he was given laughing gas he actually did start laughing.  It was the funniest thing and it made the doctors laugh, too!  Then, like Vizzini in "The Princess Bride", Michael conked out mid-laughter and was fast asleep.

We've had an unusually warm December, which I certainly don't mind.  Christmas Day however, it started to snow, so we got our white Christmas this year after all.

 We love our Christmas lights this year

Riding on a sled after a white Christmas

One of the Christmas gifts Liz and I gave to our 3 oldest children is some 2-on-1 time.  On the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Christmas we hired a babysitter and both Liz and I took one of our children out on a lunch date to the restaurant of their choice.  We enjoyed getting some more personalized time with our children, and those at home enjoyed getting their face painted by the babysitter.

Baking Christmas cookies

We can't wait for Christmas!

We spent Christmas Day at home relaxing with the family.  Santa left a new book for each child under the small Christmas trees in the children's bedrooms so they had a present to open and something fun to read while waiting to open presents.  One noteworthy present this year was an indoor slide for Michael.  He absolutely loves climbing slides and sliding back down again, and it's so good for helping him build up his strength and coordination.  So he was thrilled to get an indoor slide he can use when it's cold outside.

Michael's new slide

Brooklyn loves to eat, er, color with her new markers

We were supposed to head to Utah to visit Liz's family the day after Christmas, but we'd been having intermittent problems with our minivan.  We had taken it into the shop a few weeks earlier, but the mechanic couldn't reproduce the problem.   So we continued driving it until the 23rd, when the strange noise returned, the engine stalled, and the check engine light went on.  We took the van back into the shop on the 24th (Christmas Eve), but the mechanic was closed during the holidays and couldn't fix it until the 29th.  They were able to find and fix the problem this time around, so we drove out to Utah on the 31st instead (New Years Eve).  With the snowstorms we've received since Christmas Day it's unclear we would have been able to make the drive anyway, even if the minivan hadn't broken down. As it was, we had cold temperatures during the drive (it was -15 degrees in Fort Collins as we packed up the car to go) but the roads were clear and we arrived in time to bring in the New Year with the Bellamy family.