Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! Our first Christmas in Portland has been a memorable one.

From this past Friday through Christmas Eve we were not able to leave the house. It has been over a week since we have received mail and over three weeks since our last garbage pickup.

The lack of mail service created some drama since Santa was leveraging US Postal Service for some key stocking-stuffers this year. Roger tracked them to a distribution center in Hillsboro where an employee named Jaime went through boxes and boxes of delayed parcels. This was in stark contrast to UPS who had no way of locating the parcels even though they had tracking numbers for each parcel. Mike, Amy and Lucas were able to pick up the first two packages for us and our neighbors Pravine and Anu were able to get the third package. A sincere thanks to everyone who helped Santa with his delivery to our home! :-)

But despite all of this generosity we were still feeling a bit sad about missing mass on Christmas Eve. Both Mika and Ellie were supposed to sing and the cabin-fever was really setting in. Fortunately the weather was starting to edge above freezing which made the snow a bit easier to shovel. So Roger and our two neighbors all started shoveling and about four hours later we had all dug ourselves out of our culdesac. It happened all just in time for us to make the 5 o'clock mass on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve was a late night for Santa's helpers. :-(

Christmas Day was beautiful. We had a light dusting of snow and the kids all loved their presents. The kids opened Doc& Gram's presents while on a Skype video conference with them. The quote of the morning came after Annisa opened her American Girl doll and Ellie told her, "You have to show Uncle Mark because he LOVES American Girl dolls!" :-)

The afternoon was a little rough getting out of the house and down to Grammie's house, but eventually we made it. One funny quote from Nisa came at dinner when Roger asked her not to lick her lips and use a napkin. Nisa replied, "I wasn't licking my lips, I was licking my face."

Another Nisa holiday observation was when she was talking to Gram about our Christmas decorations. Gram asked Nisa, "Have you decorated your tree yet?" Nisa replied, "Yea, and we even decorated the budha head with Santa hat!"

But what might be the most memorable part of this Christmas what Maile told Nisa after dinner. She said "Thank you Nisa." ... it was our own Christmas miracle. ;-)