Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Blessed Epiphany, and my 21st Birthday...

Merry Christmas! 2015 was a very busy year for my family...on top of our normal activities, we've been busy building our new home and even managed to move in by Christmas...Christmas Eve in fact! It's not completed yet; the only working sink in the house is in the kitchen, we have no fencing for our animals, the upstairs still has to be sealed and painted, and we seem to be having one problem after another with our plumbing, but we are all very happy to finally be in our own home.  We were flooded in the day after Christmas and we hadn't hooked up our internet or phone lines yet, so we were able to spend nearly a week cut off from the world, resting, relaxing, and enjoying each others company after months of constantly working and running to town for supplies.  A friend had given my brothers and I some books for Christmas, we had received some new board games and movies from our parents, and had enough treats and leftovers from Christmas dinner to keep us well fed and happy all week.

Dad and the boys did most of the building themselves, including hand sanding, buffing, and staining the floors Christmas Eve because the machine we'd rented was not working.   Mom and I painted most of the rooms...sometimes twice and in Mom's bathroom three or four times because we still can't agree on a color we like.

The kitchen is probably everyone's favorite room in the house...all of us love to cook and the kitchen in the house we've been renting was barely big enough for two people to move around in, let alone fix meals in.  Our new kitchen has enough room for everyone to cook something different in at the same time if we wanted to, and it has definitely been put to good use.  Christmas dinner was a breeze with our six burner stove and double oven, not to mention the warming drawer.


How many girls nowadays get a formal ball for their twenty-first birthday? None that I know, but our Christmas/New Years/Epiphany Ball just happened to be the day before my birthday and, though not technically held in my honor, everyone sang Happy Birthday to me and referred to it as my "Coming Out" party =).

 

All the balls we've been having this past year have been spent mainly learning and teaching the dances, but this time everyone knew precisely what to do.  When Mrs. H. and I were putting together the program, we realized that we had learned the steps to over twenty dances...and we were able to dance a couple of new ones that no one had learned beforehand because everyone knew what we meant when we called out the steps! 

This was "Jenny's Market", a dance we learned  from the 2009 "Emma"...it's one of my personal favorites...

For my actual birthday, I got to spend the whole day relaxing, which is just the way I like to spend my birthday.  The ball was amazing, but it felt wonderful to soak in a warm bubble bath (after we finally got the pipes un-frozen, that is.  My poor dad was outside almost the whole day trying to fix the plumbing so we could have running water...).  Mom made some Pink Lady Cocktails (and I discovered once again that alcohol and I don't get along well.  One glass was enough to make me too dizzy to walk very well while the rest of my family was able to have two without any side effects) and my brother made me Hawaiian pizza and a pineapple cheesecake.  And, best of all, I found some maraschino cherries at Whole Foods without any bad ingredients...it used to be a tradition for me to always have maraschino cherries on my birthday cake, but because of the dyes and artificial flavorings I haven't been able to have them in years.  We finished up the night with my new favorite movie (Winter's Tale) and a Sherlock episode; all in all a lovely day.  Unfortunately, that night we had a major water leak upstairs which destroyed the ceiling in the kitchen and my parent's closet, ruined part of the floor, and drowned mine and brother's cell phones =(.  Thank goodness the ceiling was just soaked and didn't collapse on us...

Things are always hopping around here, that's for sure! In the next few months, we'll be finishing up our house, moving the rest of our stuff over, planning our Mardi Gras dance, planning a bridal shower for a friend, preparing for Lent, fencing off some land for our livestock...and I want to start on making some curtains and various decoration for our new rooms.  I hope you all had a blessed Christmastide, New Years,and Epiphany! =)