Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Fly Fishing, Turkey, King Tut and More

Time for the Super-Mega-Chritmas-Extravaganza post where we make up for two weeks of nothing with one novella of a post...

We hope everybody is having a great end of their year. We had a wonderful Christmas week with both families. We started off the weekend before Christmas by celebrating with the Suskays at the cabin. Friday night we found out that we would spend Saturday learning how to fly fish. Very cool gift from Santa Suskay.

We spent the first half of Saturday learning the history and details of fly fishing from the great folks at Unicoi Outfitters. They taught us how to tie knots, what types of rods to use and a ton more. After lunch, we suited up and headed out to the river where we spent the first hour or so learning and practicing different casts. Then we spread out a bit and spent the next several
hours fishing. Mandie did the best (she's the only one that actually caught anything, actually) but we all had a great time. We'll definitely be going fly fishing again.

The rest of the weekend was spent just relaxing and exchanging gifts. Patrick LOVED tearing through the paper and tissue paper. He got very spoiled by his grandparents and aunts and uncle.

Christmas Eve we went to mass at St. Ann's with both families and then went home to eat dinner. I also got to read The Night Before Christmas to Patrick that night for the first time. It's always been a tradition in my family that my Dad would read that book Christmas Eve night before we all went to bed and it was really neat being able to start that tradition with Patrick. We'll have to have his Uncle Jonathan teach him our other family tradition of making vomiting noises at the point of the book where it says "and threw up the sash."

In a horrible turn of events, we lost the charger for our camera and didn't realize it until the battery died on Christmas Eve. So, we don't have any pictures of Patrick opening gifts on Christmas morning or many from the rest of Christmas day. We took video of it though so we can have the memories. We had a really fun morning with him watching him get excited when the presents came out and tearing into them as soon as they were put down. We spent Christmas afternoon and evening over at Grandma and Grandpa Flowers' house with the whole crew. Patrick was spoiled even more by gifts from everyone and we were spoiled by one of the best Christmas dinners I've had. I swear the turkey was basted in angel dust and magic.

We all headed back up to the cabin for Friday and Saturday and Patrick got to go on a hike and see his first waterfall. Patrick has discovered his high voice (or, "Mariah Carey notes" as we like to call them) in the past week or two and fully exercised it on the hike. He squealed in delight every few seconds at every tree he saw, every breeze that blew and the waterfalls almost sent him over the edge.

Another gift from Santa Suskay was to see the King Tut exhibit at the Cobb Civic center. Papa and Meme kept Patrick for the afternoon while all the "kids" went to the exhibit.

It was quite the whirlwind week but a ton of fun to see everybody. It was awesome having Mandie and Tim in town from Idaho for the whole week and getting to see both families for Patrick's first Christmas. We had a really fun time watching him react to all the new things he saw and did.

Finally, here's a slideshow full of pictures from the week. If you're like me and not patient enough to wait for the slides to change on their own, you can always go directly to the whole album and view all the pictures at once by clicking here.


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