Holiday Recap

We’re almost to the middle of January?! I feel greatly unprepared for the warp speed at which our calendar is barreling forward. With the holiday season quickly fading into the background, I thought I would give a quick recap of what TB and I were up to during the end of December and into the New Year...

The week of Christmas Travis snagged a “Groupon” to stay overnight at the Gaylord National Resort out at National Harbor. We enjoyed a little “mini vacation” for 24 hours in an executive suite.

Lovely decorations.

The real purpose of this stay was to reserve some time to discuss our goals for the upcoming year. Notice that I say goals, and not resolutions. We are trying to avoid the failure that comes with flippantly made New Year’s resolutions, and instead be really intentional and realistic about what we can actually accomplish in 2011. We have been going through a worksheet from a talk by Mark Driscoll for a few months in order to reflect on where we’re headed and what our priorities should be. Needless to say, this is an ongoing task and therefore our 24-hour stay at the hotel didn’t provide enough time to go over everything. But it was a start. And we had a lot of fun!

We spent Christmas Eve with our friends Eric and Sara out in Leesburg. We played games, went to a Christmas Eve service at their church, and made homemade wonton soup. Sara’s family has a tradition of making the soup on Christmas Eve and it was delicious. Growing up my family always went out for Chinese food after church on Christmas Eve, so this kind of gave me my fix. (Blurry photos...sorry)

Christmas Day was quiet and relaxing. We spent our first Christmas in our own place, away from family. We slept in, watched movies, and did not get out of our pajamas the entire day. The highlight (and “lowlight”) of the day was an adventure in making Pioneer Woman’s cinnamon rolls. It was both a positive and negative experience. Positive because these are the best cinnamon rolls that we have ever had. Ever. Negative because I ended up ruining the first batch and had to make a second batch. Who knew that scalding milk could cause so much trouble? Even now I am still using a razor blade to scrape burned milk and sugar off of our stovetop. So, we didn’t eat our Christmas breakfast until about 4:00. And after that I decided to scrap making Christmas dinner, which was going to be a yummy “surf and turf” meal. But the cinnamon rolls were so good in the end that we didn’t care!

So much butter!

These puppies rose like crazy. I called them "suicidal cinnamon rolls" because one of them lopped itself over the edge and the dough blobbed onto the bottom of the oven and burnt to a crisp.

I love me some mimosas!

On New Year’s Eve we flew out to Colorado to celebrate Travis’ Dad’s retirement from the Air Force. We feasted on homemade salsa, enchiladas, posole, chicken with mole, etc. Mmmm...

During the remainder of our 6-day visit we just hung out and relaxed with our families, which involved playing a lot of board games, doing jigsaw puzzles, watching movies, etc. It appears that we didn’t take many pictures during this visit. Woops! Guess we were too busy relaxing!

And now we’re back in the swing of things here in DC! We had a great holiday season. Happy New Year everyone!