Christmas with my dad and the start of a new year

We rang in the new year today by tearing down and packing up all the holiday decorations and deep cleaning the whole first floor of the house for the first time in about a year and a half. We even mopped the floor. I swear we haven't done that since the summer of 2011. When we were about 3 hours into it and pulling pile after pile of dried up food out of the microwave it occurred to me that the true sign of getting old is when you spend New Year's day cleaning instead of recovering from a hangover....hello geezer-ville.

My compulsion to ring in the new year fresh is carrying over into the blog. I'm probably not going to get around to posting the pics I took on my phone when we went to see The Nutcracker at the BSO  or the pics from Addison's birthday party (none of which are that great anyway), but here are pics from our third and final Christmas at my dad's house and, aside from the previous mentioned, our last pics from the old year.

We drove back to my dad's a couple days after Christmas, the day after all that snow and Hannah's debut on TV. It was beyond freezing, but that didn't stop Hannah and Pappy from hopping on the tractor for a ride.

Hannah and Pappy and Grandma Sondra did a ton of building after defrosting from the frigid weather. They bought Hannah these super cool Twig blocks.  Sondra made the blocks in the foreground of the pic below--she is incredibly handy with a wood saw! They are Clay's present, but he hadn't been over yet so we got to play with them. She also used her woodworking skills to make Hannah a really nice wooden puzzle.

When Hannah started losing steam and curled up on the chair with Pappy, I took a few pics and then we hit the road back to Baltimore.

Au revoir to Christmas--all three of them--and 2012! Happy New Year all!!