Still waiting

Still waiting for my hard drive to be fixed. It got to take a trip to California. I've never been to California. It malfunctions and gets a vacation??? So unfair! Still waiting on Christmas. The kids had their last day of school today until the new year. I took grant in to help with grace's Christmas party. They go a bit overboard I think. A chocolate fountain for a first grade party?? Really? Maybe I'm just being ebenezer, or at the very least ebenezer's grumpy wife. Anyway, the party was fun and school is over. No more 5:30 mornings until next year! We decorated the tree at the farm tonight. I forgot the big needles needed to string cranberries so that was a fail. Instead we made salt dough cookies with our Christmas cookie cutters. The kids each made a hand print too. I'm waiting on them to finish baking as I type this. It is peaceful here tonight looking at the tree, listening to Christmas music and the sounds of family surrounding me. What more could a person ask for on a perfect December evening? Tomorrow we are going riding. Did I mention we got some more horses? We got more horses. Six more to be exact. That put our horse population up to eleven. Actually though we traded two of our horses to a guy for two others then bought four others so we really "only" have nine horses. How does a family go from having NOTHING relating to horses to owning nine of them in under six months?? leave it to us to figure out a way to do it. We wanted horses a little more reliable and trustworthy for now. None of us are experienced riders and the two horses we traded were simply too advanced for our limited skills. They will be happier elsewhere and we will be able to do some riding instead of retraining horses too long left unridden by previous owners. Last night john and Emily had a Christmas concert at their middle school. The auditorium was standing room only. We know that because we stood! That's okay though. It made taking pictures easier. The concert was really enjoyable with all the various groups performing quite well. The band, orchestra and choir all took turns entertaining the audience. I'm always amazes at how much their instructors can accomplish with a bunch of rowdy kids in such a short amount of time. Grant is now officially five. We had a little celebration the evening of his actual birthday. I do have pictures. I'll get pictures posted as soon as I have my computer back up and running. I'm not proofing this so there is a high probability that autocorrect has made this totally unreadable. Hopefully not. Take care. More later from the zoo!