Christmas Pictures

We obviously made it to Rochester to celebrate Christmas with my family (minus Mike, Jen, and the kids in Arizona). We had a fun time, watched several movies, spent an evening looking through old slides (yes, slides!) and home movies. We've all agreed that Matt looked like Chris Farley when he was a baby. Boy, was that kid chubby! We had good times together.

We flew home early Friday morning to be greeted by David's parents (at our house). Allie soon returned to us from her stay at Doggie camp (Thanks, Greg and Rita!). She was WIPED OUT after spending 4 days playing non-stop with three other dogs. She had just enough energy to try on her new Christmas accessory from "Grandma and Grandpa Gafford" and then she crashed on David's lap for the remainder of our festivities. David just had to open his presents around her because she wasn't about to move.

Not quite the Christmas we had planned....

David and I celebrated our Christmas yesterday, anticipating spending the day today traveling to New York to visit my parents. So this morning when we woke up, we got right to work packing and getting the dog's things together to drop her off at the sitters' house. We were within 15 minutes of loading the car and leaving when I noticed a voice mail on my cel phone. I wasn't surprised; when booking with Orbitz, I'm used to receiving a phone call a few hours before my flight. Only this time the voice mail was different. It was supposed to say something along the lines of "Orbitz is calling to inform you that your flight to Rochester, NY is on time and will be boarding at gate such-and-such." Only that's not what it said. It said, "Orbitz is calling to inform you that your flight to Rochester, NY has been cancelled and you're going to need to sit around the house and pick your nose all day because you're not going to be in Rochester until 10:00 tonight. So you can forget about a nice Christmas dinner with your family. But have a nice flight." (Ok, I realize that this probably wasn't what the message said exactly, but it was something to that effect...) It was just kind of disappointing... not what we had planned for the day. I'm sure we'll get there eventually. (Hopefully at least by 10:00 tonight!) And I'm sure we'll have a great time once we're there. I just hate it when plans have to change like that.

Anyway, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!

(Jenn Swift, will you be in Rochester this week? We should get together...)

It's official

We are no longer home owners in Michigan! The closing yesterday was a success (which was a relief because we were a little concerned that we might have missed a place where we were supposed to sign and they'd have to send the paper work back and delay the closing.) Now we're just waiting for the money to show up in our bank account.....

Worship Arts Christmas Open House

Friday night we invited all of our worship arts volunteers over for a Christmas open house. This included any one involved with music, drama, sound, video, and probably other areas that I forgot. We had a good time getting to know those that help us each weekend and the families that support them.



Our senior pastor, Henry enjoyed spending his evening playing the Nintendo Wii.

Field trip to the Bakken Museum

We took the fourth grade class to the Bakken museum on Thursday. They learned all about static electricity, which was especially fun since I've been teaching electricity in science for the last few weeks. The kids had a great time, as the day was greatly hands-on. They really enjoyed all of the experiments and especially getting to shock each other.

Here the kids were testing different materials to see which conducted static electricity the best.

Here, the kids have made generators and Leyden jars to store up static electricity in order to be able to shock each other. It's amazing the fun you can have with a few styrofoam plates, cups, and an empty film canister!

It's amazing how much enjoyment my students got out of watching their teacher electrocute herself.

It was a fun day for all!

The long awaited Thanksgiving photos!

The Gafford Clan

Yes, we're still alive...

Busy. Just very, very, busy.

We took a nice trip to Indiana for Thanksgiving. It was good to see all the family, many of which we haven't seen for a very long time. I'd post a picture, but I'm on the wrong computer for that. They're on David's laptop. I'll have to do it later.

I was surfing around on everyone's blogs this morning and it just hit me that we haven't announced yet that we've finally sold our house....mostly. We haven't closed on it yet; hopefully in the next couple of weeks. It's something we're very relieved about. It will be nice to not have to worry about it anymore. But I can't say that we've been terribly excited about it, because we're selling it for less than we bought it for. Much less, in our eyes. So it's exciting in a disappointing kind of way. But the sooner we can stop flushing our mortgage payment down the toilet, the sooner we can begin saving it for the next house. We'll just be relieved when it's all over with. That will be nice.

It's extremely cold here. I don't think it's gotten warmer than 25 all week. In fact, my thermometer's spent most of the week in the teens. Windchill got down to zero a few days ago. Our pond's completely frozen over. Brrr!