Happy Holidays from the Ramirez Family!

Rick and I got a nice little break this holiday season with my parents coming into town and his family having their usual Christmas Eve party. It was an easy split with my family's traditional Christmas Day party. No missed flights, no last minute calls from work, or no forlorn phone calls to one or the other's family hundreds of miles away. The usual suspects were absent. "Usual suspects" being overwhelmingly represented by my immediate family. Sister, brother, niece, nephew...we know the drill. The recentness of the wedding which brought a bunch of my family out of the woodwork makes the absentee pill a little easier to swallow.  Rick's family has outgrown any of each other's houses, so this year they utilized an old bar belonging to a family friend.  This is the same abandoned bar where Rick celebrated his Bachelor party.  When he told me the guys were concerned that the strippers wouldn't come inside the place I was sure that having the Christmas party there was out of the question.  I mean this bar hadn't been occupied - or even kept up - for years.  But after weeks of clean up and the decorating expertise of a family friend, it was surprisingly clean and festive. In all it was a really great time, although Christmas day was made quite difficult by the Christmas Eve party.

I've come to build an interesting relationship with Rick's oldest sister and her husband.  I'm actually becoming more and more aware of the relationships that I have with Rick's siblings as individuals.  With such a large crew it's hard to realize how you really interact with each person singularly.  Rick's oldest sister and her husband are the kind of people that we can stay up all night with just talking and drinking.  Not doing anything special; just sitting around the table, sipping good tequila, and talking about life.  Clearly all that talking got away from us because it was after 5am when we finally looked at the clock. With my parents coming to our house that morning to open gifts I knew we were in for a rough one. Rick was lucky enough to get a second wind once he got home and walked the dog at which time he insisted we open a few presents. We were two presents in when he started to fall asleep sitting up. By that time it was easily 6:30am.  My parents did us the justice of not showing up until around 11am, but we still were rather rough for the wear.  Opened presents then back to bed.  We weren't ourselves at my Grandmother's house, but it was probably better that we couldn't have any of my Dad's (knock-you-on-your-you-know-what) egg nog.  As usual  my family brought back many great memories and made even more.

Looking forward to the all the great things this New Year will bring.  On the menu so far: a real budget that should have us back in the market for a house before the next decade (yay!), a lot of Cancer killing, maybe a 'Cancer-cation', preparations for my Golden Birthday, babytalk (from everyone besides us), and much, much more to come!