he said, she said

we hosted our first christmas dinner at our house =) it was so nice to have both our families over for the festive occasion. as always, the company was wonderful and the food was plentiful. in the holiday spirit, my little niece and nephew even made gingerbread cookies. check them out — some of them are anatomically correct! haha!

even though we have a wii, my cousin’s family brought over their xbox 360 along with the rock band game, complete with guitars, mic, and drumset. the kids are pretty darn good at it. they spent most of the night playing games, helping me feed the puppies, and playing with momma rottie (who they loooved because she looks like their recently-passed family pet, harley). you’ll have to ask mike about how he tried to explain to them why she is a “milk dog”, cuz their male rottweiler certainly was not! haha! that story never gets old.

thanks so much to cindy for the superb suggestion to ask our guests to bring ornaments for our tree! it was so appropriate, since everyone else in the family has hosted christmas at their houses in the past, we asked them to bring a little bit of christmas cheer from their houses to ours, in the form of an ornament from their own collections. i added: “it doesn’t have to be anything fancy — an old glass bulb or some popsicle sticks your kid glued together would be perfect! it will be the start of our ornament collection which we’ll bring out every year!” my grandma asked my mom why i wanted everyone to bring light bulbs over to our house, but that misunderstanding was quickly cleared up.

before everyone arrived, i had hung candy ornaments on the tree and tied a nametag to each — one for every guest. and as each person hung their “old” ornament, they took down the candy ornament with their name on it to take home with them. we got all sorts of great decorations for our tree — some plush mice (from auntie jan’s cats), little colored balls (from my mom and dad), christmas flip flops (from jamie and alyssa), sparkly silver shapes (from mike’s parents), foam cutouts hand-decorated with gems and sequins (from my niece and nephews), silver C and M initials (from cindy and jin), and lots lots more!
you probably can’t see all the ornaments in the photo, but here we are… in our house… with our christmas tree fully decorated by our friends and family… on our first christmas together. life is good.

*our first christmas* -gabriela anders

we had our families over for christmas this year.  it was the first time that we had hosted a big family function at our house.  the invite said to come at 4pm.  i asked christi when she expected us to eat dinner and she said 6pm, so i told my parents to come at 5pm.

it turns out that christi’s family is very prompt and they all started to trickle in shortly before 4pm.  i had planned to start cooking at around 5pm, but with everyone arriving, it was crazy.

christi’s niece and nephews were very excited to see the mama dog that we were fostering.  one of them asked, “how come the dog isn’t with the puppies?”  i told her that it was because she has an infection and her milk isn’t good for the puppies anymore.

“what’s an infection?”

“infection?  uhhh, it’s when you get a cut and it hurts because you have germs.”

“oh!  germs!  the dog has germs?”

“uhh…yeah.”

“how do the puppies drink milk?”

“errr, what?”

“how do the puppies drink milk?”

“well…uhhh , you see, they drink the milk from the mama dog.”

“what?  how?  this isn’t a…” and she peers under the dog to see her nipples.  “oh!!!!  this is a milk dog!!  we didn’t have a milk dog!”

“uhh, yeah…it’s a milk dog.  where’s your mommy?”

talk about avoiding an uncomfortable situation.  i didn’t think that their first talk about the birds and the bees should be with their uncle mike at a christmas dinner in the garage.  =P