Happy Holidays!

So Christmas came and went and, as usual, it was lots of fun. Until the new year, it's still the holiday season so I'm in holiday season mode. Highlights of this week:

• After our family Christmas dinner, we usually open Christmas gifts. My cousin's 8-year old son, Elijah, had saved up all his change to buy presents for his grandparents and his aunt and uncles. One present the little guy bought was a marker for his uncle, one of my other cousins. We later joked that the money must have run out when he bought that particular gift. Anyways, when my cousin opened the gift and proclaimed,
  "Oh, a marker! Thanks Lijah. "
  Elijah excitedly came over and said, "It's a special marker. See!" and he pulled off the cover of the marker to reveal a white tip. Too cute!
• Christmas dinner was great! My mother's cake is also very good this year. Now looking forward to today's and New Year's dinner with just our family!
• In preparation for France (just under 4 weeks left!), I bought a laptop for 699.99 from Best Buy's online Boxing Day sale - HP DV2618CA AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core TL-58 1.8GHz Laptop, 250GB HD, 2GB RAM, 559MB video memory, Vista Home Premium, remote, headset AND it is bilingual so it's not bad. I was trying to get a Toshiba similar to it for $499.99 or a similar Sony for $599.99 from Future Shop's online Boxing Day sale but Future Shop's servers crashed for the first 3 hours of their online Boxing day sale and I didn't want to waste more time when I could be with family.
• Shanae is making strides with sitting up. She's started making like she's going to sit up but only gets 1/3 of the way up. Very cute.