Happy New Year!  Holy cow, 2009 already!  I hope you had a good New Year’s.  Ours was wonderul.  We hosted a bash, which is always great so that we don’t have to pack up the kids and all their luggage just to haul them out somewhere to stay until the wee hours of the morning.  We played charades and other games and ate lots of yummy treats.  Our kids – #2 and #4 in birth order – fell asleep way early.  The older one stayed asleep all night, but wouldn’t you know it – the baby woke right as we crawled into bed at 4 in the morning.  I was able to sleep for a few hours, but that’s more than I can say for my husband who woke with the baby.  But then he got a short nap while I ambled downstairs to do some much needed cleanup from the party.  After that, we were ready to drag ourselves over to a friend’s house for a New Year’s Day chili feast – I’m told the beans bring good luck in the new year.  More food, more fun, and we didn’t plan on staying long but ended up getting home about 7 in the evening.  I did miss the hockey game at Wrigley Field, but the Red Wings beat the Blackhawks anyway.  I’m not a big hockey fan; I just thought it would be cool to see Wrigley all decked out for hockey.  I wonder what they would have done if they had gotten some of that freak 60 degree weather again – how to maintain an ice rink in those conditions?  Oh well, that’s a tangent, good thing this site is called tangents.org

So the chili and rest of the food at our friends house was great, but I wish I could have enjoyed it more – seems I partied a little too hard the night before and felt a little tired and queasy come chili feast time.  But it’s my own fault – I should know that I’m getting older and can’t handle the late nights (or early mornings for that matter) like I used to.  But oh well – my friend did give me some delicious chili to take home, so hopefully it will be more enjoyable now that I was able to rest last night.  Now I’ll just have to get used to writing 2009 instead of 2008 all over the place…

Because I barely have time to fit in the writing of this current blog post, I can safely say that with 4 kids running around (Christmas break = parental nightmare) this will be my last blog post of 2008!  What better way to go out then but to experiment with the new polling feature of tangents.org and make a New Year’s themed poll?  Enjoy, and have a very happy and safe New Year’s celebration!  Here’s wishing you the best of luck in 2009!  Check all that apply:

[poll id=”3″]

Merry Christmas!

We hope this Christmas Blogcard finds you and yours happy, safe, and healthy.  We want to thank all of you who thought of our family this year and sent us the wonderful Christmas cards.  I was going to send out Christmas e-cards with pictures of the kids this year, but somehow time got away from me (somehow?  I have 4 kids!) and wouldn’t you know it – it’s already Christmas and we never even got our family Christmas picture taken!  So I gathered the kids, put them in front of the Christmas tree, and viola!  Our family’s 2008 version of Christmas cards, and this is the fastest way to make sure we sent our Christmas wishes before the holiday is over.
As for our family, 2008 was busy but great.  The kids are doing wonderfully!  Taylor just turned 9 and really likes 3rd grade.  She loves to read and is a very talented artist.  Sammie is 4 and in preschool.  She is learning to write her name and loves Barbies.  Disney is 2 and still very sweet.  She loves to play with baby dolls and play-doh.  Baby Christopher has learned to jump in his bouncy seat, and he loves to use his hands, especially to grab his toes.
God Bless everyone and we wish you and your family a truly happy holiday season, as well as the rest of the year, of course!  We are so lucky to have such wonderful friends and family!  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Love,
Chris, Lisa, Taylor, Sammie, Disney, and Christopher

While I am a current events junkie, I am most reluctant to follow politics for some reason. Give me true-crime stories, entertainment news, or natural disaster tales any day – I can’t get enough. But when it comes to politics, I have trouble even forcing myself to follow the news, even though they talk about it on one of my favorite channels (CNN) nonstop lately. You’d think it’d be enough motivation for me to follow politics just to be “in the loop”, but it’s a natural instinct of mine to tune out political news. How interesting then, that my husband is really ONLY interested in current events involving politics… I guess you could say we compliment each other that way. So while he had on CNN following some of the last of the primaries tonight, I heard an interesting story developing… it seems poor Hillary Clinton, who lost horribly in North Carolina today, couldn’t even get a break today at her wrap-up party after the primary… They had 2 confetti machines ready to shoot confetti over the crowd, and they malfunctioned, only to shoot the confetti a pathetic 4 feet from the machine… just not Hillary’s night, I guess…