Maddie's Ornament Gift

Here's a picture of the ornament that Maddie got us for Christmas!  Back when we were at Dollywood, Nate and Maddie were off on their own a good bit, and on one occasion, Maddie secretly purchased a Christmas ornament for us, carefully hiding it from our view from that moment on.  She's had it hidden away for months and was quite excited to give it to us on Christmas morning!  This is a picture from Christmas Day, but since then it has been decided that this ornament would be better on the piano room tree, where you can currently find it on display.  Maddie knows that Mom likes gnomes, and thought this would be a sweet gift for her.  It is!

Today is Sunday, and our own church has no services this morning, giving staff and volunteers a nice day of rest for the season.  That being said, we went to church anyway!  Not at our church, but in the case of Maddie and Nate, they both went to visit a church in Dawsonville with Nate's parents - and meanwhile, we too went to a church in Dawsonville that was pretty nice.  It's been a while since we've been to any church service, let alone a service at another church.  So this was a fairly unique morning.  

Maddie spent the day at Nate's house, and she brought along her copy of "Exploding Kittens" for the family to play.  It was fun!

We got home from church and the day was good and restful.  I was on the treadmill continuing with the Rocky movies, marching along there on the virtual path I've got set up on the phone as well.  For lunch we've been eating our Factor meals like usual, but we still have leftovers, including too much leftover desserts and sweets.  Ugh!  I can't wait to get rid of all this sugar!

Tonight Mom and I were watching one of the movies I got her from Christmas.  Stocking stuffers, really, but I picked up for a fairly cheap price a lot of those live productions they used to air on television, like "Grease," "The Wiz," "Hairspray," "Peter Pan," and "The Sound of Music."  Of course, we already own "Peter Pan," but we may watch that one again soon as a part of a marathon of sorts.  We started it out with "Grease," a version we hadn't seen before.  They did a great job with it.  We think these are fun, and we don't really watch to see live mistakes or anything like that - we just enjoy the energy of a live performance.  It was done really well!

We ended this quiet day with reading from our mystery book, a novel story involving Adrian Monk.  It's called "Monk and the Two Assistants."  I picked this up to celebrate the "Book Flood" on Christmas Eve, and we've been reading it ever since, moving along chapter by chapter.  I've got some new books I've been going through too, so it's been a relaxing day here.

We closed things up with prayer, and getting tucked in for bed.  It's noisy out there.  The wind is coming, and with it a dramatic change in temperature.