Time to tie up some loose ends . . .

Remember back before the kids' Christmas vacation - I needed to pick up something for K's Secret Pal at school? Here's what I ended up getting - a stretchy lizard, alligator gummy candies, and Pop Rocks. Apparently the kid was happy, so K was happy, which made me happy:



For my birthday in October (I was 29 again) my family got me tickets to a Lorie Line concert. Lorie Line is an amazing pianist from Minneapolis and she puts on her "Holiday Extravaganza" every year, complete with lots of costumes. I've been wanting (and hinting) to go for several years. The concert was in Grand Forks, ND on December 21 (a bitterly cold day!) and J and I went together. Lorie puts out nice piano sheet music books, so we came home with 3, and have been enjoying them a lot! Here's a pic from the concert - at the end they invite all the kids there to come backstage, and dress them up in costumes, too. Her husband is the MC and at one point he dressed up as Martin Luther and talked about salvation by faith in Christ instead of works - it was pretty neat.



And here are a couple shots taken on the way home from our trip to Minnesota over the holidays. Rascal slept most of the way, but did have opportunity to bark at strangers during stops for gas. And the kids were a little goofy.