Happy Times!

I've been bad at updating.

Mat took Maddie and Isaac to Midnight Mass at the Catholic Church in Ormond Beach on Christmas Eve.  They thought that was pretty cool!  In our younger days, we used to go pretty regularly.  Both of us went to midnight mass on our missions too, so for  awhile it was a tradition.

Christmas day was pretty laid back.  We have a tradition of giving each other a present from the dollar store.  It's actually really funny, because sometimes the gifts are more like a "white elephant", sometimes they are gifts that might actually get used!  For example, Isaac got pink socks, McKinley got a oil funnel for a car, Brooklyn got a package of paper clips, Maddie got a marijuana test kit!  No one got a dog toy this year, that's been a running joke for several years. We always laugh a lot and I marvel at the kids creativity with their $3 budgets.






We also have a tradition of going to a newly released movie on Christmas day.  This year we did two!  We all saw an early showing of Coco, in the evening half of us saw Wonder (which I would highly recommend!) and the other half went to Star Wars.  They were showing at the same time, so it worked out perfect.  IHOP was open, so that's where we ate our Christmas dinner.  :)  I did make a nice dinner on Christmas Eve . . .  for the record.

Yesterday (Tuesday) we spent some time at Blue Springs State Park.  It was such a cool place, it's one of the many places manatees come in the winter.  The manatees share the springs with all kinds of wildlife, turtles, alligators, lots of species of birds, I'm sure there were so many other critters we didn't see.  There were dozens of manatees lounging around in the shallows, and that was so cool to see!

After Blue Springs, we drove down to the temple in Orlando where Mat and the kids did baptisms.  I hung out with McKinley in the waiting room and on the grounds, got some great pictures!  I love the temple, no matter where it is!  There's no better place to go, it was worth going out of our way to get there.

Today (Wednesday) we went on a tour of a chocolate factory.  "Tour" is a big stretch though!  They had 4 windows in a narrow hallway and so many people that you couldn't see much, but we did get to sample and buy at the end of the tour.  I'm not much for creme-centered chocolates, but I did find a bag of dark chocolate honeycomb.  Anyone else know what that is??  I've eaten it since I was a kid.  My mom loved it too!  We'd go see my dad at work, and go to the candy counter every time we went to Ogden (we lived in Huntsville).  Everyone picked out their favorite thing, and we spent a large-ish amount of money on chocolate.  Worth every penny!

The weather has been kind of yucky today, cold and windy with some spotty rain.  We attempted the beach this morning, knowing that it would be our last opportunity, but we didn't stay long because of those conditions.  I posted a video on FB of Brooklyn attempting to fly the kite.  She kept it in the air for a few minutes, but it was flying wildly in all directions.

Last chance at the beach!  There was no one else there - the conditions were less than ideal!

We also planned to go to today to a mini golf place called Congo River Golf.  We pulled up and got out, and I was skeptical!  It was cold and windy (it's just across the street from the ocean), but my amazing family convinced me it would be OK, we should just try it.  There were a lot of people there, so I thought I should NOT be a wimp in this situation.  And I'm glad!  It was really fun! I've never seen a miniature golf place quite like this one, with water hazards, ball tunnels, obstructions, holes with hills going up and down, etc.  The kids were so funny, competitive in a great way, and encouraging.  Of course our resident golfer (Mat) got the lowest score.