SHOP 'TIL YOU DROP!

We had a lot of fun activities leading up to Christmas. On Saturday, I took 6 boys (Nick, Chris, Anthony & Aleks Debski, Nick Carr, and Tony Moore) to the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse to see the gingerbread house display. Since the boys were less than thrilled with looking at gingerbread houses, I took them all to laser tag afterwards to make up for it. On Sunday, we spent some time with our friend and neighbor, Louise, and exchanged gifts. We're so lucky to have her live just across the street! We also went to see National Treasure 2 - which was not as good as number 1. For most of the evening, we helped our neighbors, the Haynes, whose basement flooded with 2 feet of water. It was a big mess! Thank goodness the insurance company is paying for a new furnace, water heater, etc. On Monday (Xmas Eve), we had the Debski and Charles families over to the house for food and exchanging gifts. Celina make some awesome cookies! The Charles' got us a Scrabble game which we played - Dave won, I lost very badly! I'm going to get a Scrabble dictionary. Watch out Dave! Finally, we went to midnight mass at St. Mary's. I sang in the choir and had my big solo for O Holy Night. The solo went fine - Nick recorded it on his cell phone and I sounded better than I thought.

Christmas Day was very nice and quiet. We opened presents, played with our new stuff, telephoned friends and relatives, and had a nice dinner. Nick's favorite present was his new iPod, Chris' favorite was the Stronghold computer game. I liked my gift card for AC Moore so that I could buy more scrapbook supplies!

The day after Christmas is typically a big shopping day for us, and this year was no exception. Nick and I started out early at Walmart where I found a set of Christmas dishes for $4.50, the bargain of the day. We then went to AC Moore where I used most of my gift card and also to Hallmark where I got a few ornaments. Later, we picked up Chris and Art and headed for the Fingerlakes Mall. I got a few things including half price calendars. Chris tried to use his GameStop gift card, but we ran into problems with the card balance being $0. It took several phone calls over the course of the day, and another visit to the store to finally resolve the issue. In all, I spent over 2 hours on this one problem - I am officially sick and tired of GameStop. But Chris did get his games, so he's happy.