Post Christmas days

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! We had a nice, quiet, pretty relaxing holiday. I was pretty busy up through Monday, getting the last minute food and stocking stuffers, but by Tuesday all was calm again. It was just the 4 of us Christmas Eve. We watched a movie in the afternoon, then had a delicious dinner of King crab legs. I had been planning to just make us a pizza, but when DD and I were picking up the Christmas ham I noticed the crab legs were on sale and decided that would be a great meal for us, instead. Then we opened our gifts after dinner. Growing up my family always opened our gifts Christmas Eve (and so did DH's) but when our kids were little we did change to Christmas morning for quite a few years. After they got older we ended up shifting back to opening them Christmas Eve and then we do our stockings on Christmas morning. I've always liked it better that way.......speads out the gift giving and opening fun over 2 days :-)

I got WAY too much stuff! Nothing extravagant, but lots of things. PJ's, slippers, a sweater and 2 tops, some gold and diamond hoop earrings, new 4-slice toaster, coffee, chocolates (everyone went a little overboard on the chocolates this year), Starbucks gift cards, calendars, candles...We take turns opening gifts and I ended up having like 5 more to open at the end. I make DH a list of ideas of what I want and he ends up getting me all of it, LOL. Plus, DD got me quite a few things, including a cute Etsy made rice pack to heat up and put on my neck - it feels great and the heat lasts a long time.

We gave DH a new smart phone (and cheaper plan). He doesn't really use a phone much and I've been paying $43 a month for basically nothing with a dumb phone. With DS home, I finally was able to get him the new phone and plan changed. I wanted DS to handle the switching of the phone number and showing DH how to use it. The one he's on is $32 a month (with tax) and I'm using the savings to pay for the Netflix subscription that will cost $8/mo.  He/we really do need at least one smart phone between us, so that he can get email camera security notifications if we are all gone from the house. If the cameras sense a motion they will snap a picture and email it to us and we can know within a minute or two if someone was breaking into our house or garage,  plus have a picture of them.

Christmas Day my mom and uncle came over and we had a nice ham dinner. I've never "made" ham before. It's not DH's favorite, but I was tired of turkey, since we had it twice on Thanksgiving weekend. I bought an expensive ham from the grocery store meat department. It was $32 for a 4 pound boneless spiral ham, but they had a $5 off coupon. I just had to heat it up and it was really nice that it was already pre-sliced. Made the dinner pretty easy, but it was really good. My mom is feeling somewhat better, but did end up canceling the pre-Christmas party she was to host with my step-siblings and cousin. Funny....DD and DS were at her house a couple of days before Christmas helping her with something and she make the comment "I was so happy when your Mom offered to have Christmas dinner at your house this year...I didn't even hesitate to say yes".  DD said her mouth just dropped....that wasn't the reaction we got when I asked her to come over to our house for Christmas Day, LOL.

DH and DS have spent a couple of days getting the rest of the security camera's (we hadn't done the garage yet) installed and we tried a wireless connection for the system's dvr out in the garage, but even with a booster/repeater out there the signal wasn't consistent enough. I ended up getting a really long ethernet cable and they ran that from under the house and through some underground piping that was already there, out to the garage. It's all working good now, though DH is pretty exhausted - it was quite a job, even with DS's help.  Even our good neighbor installed a couple of wireless cameras at his place. He bought the same brand as ours and DS figured out how to link his cameras to our monitoring system and now DH can see his camera's too. Neighbor is very happy because he is going on a long vacation for most of the month of January and now feels better that his place will be watched too.

I am so enjoying my time off work and still get all next week off. I don't really get to sleep in - the dogs are my 7:30 am alarm, but the relaxing days have been so nice. We gave DH a blu-ray player for Christmas and have been watching a lot of movies. Last night we watched "The Kings Speech" and enjoyed that movie. I didn't realize Netflix streaming doesn't have new releases, so I was kind of bummed about that, but we'll definitely watch it a lot and get our monies worth. Plus DD will be able to watch Netflix movies and tv shows on her laptop when she goes to college.

We are going to enjoy DS for 5 more days and just hang out at home. DH will end up spending as much of my bonus as possible....at the beginning of December DS had asked if we could buy him some snow tires for $400 and I told DH that we could - as soon as I got my bonus from work. Then DS decided not to get the snow tires and when I got my bonus I didn't say anymore to DH about it...but then a few days ago he asked how I was able to afford getting him the home defense shot gun he bought, spend $100 for us all to go shooting again last week, xmas gifts, etc.  So, I reminded him that I had gotten the bonus and then he wanted to know how much.......so now of course his head is spinning with spending it.......he's into guns now, so he wants a hand gun now...and then of course he needs a gun safe....BIG SIGH..........