And That's What Christmas is All About Charlie Brown

We kicked off Mark's two week vacation with a trip up to Michael and Tara's beautiful new home for a pre-Christmas celebration with my family. Over the past few years it has been so fun to see that Mark has found his spot in our family traditions that we've had since we were young and running around my Grandma's house, and to no one's surprise that spot just happens to be next to a bottle of Anisette and my brother. They  like to set up shop at the table crimping raviolis while adding their 'colorful' commentary to the goings on around them while the women do the real work in the kitchen.

Minus Anna + Nemo

Next up, we headed back to Cbad and went to Christmas Eve Mass and spent the night at his parents house. To offset the ridiculous amount of food we were about to consume, we headed out to take a walk around the golf course Christmas morning since it was closed for the day.  What started out as a leisurely walk turned in to a grown up style Easter egg hunt with everyone scouring the canyons for golf balls. We cleaned up with 263 balls total which makes me think the course must be pretty tough. . .or some peeps need to hit the range more often. We had a great time consuming everything in sight and opening lots of wonderful presents. The Goose really made out like a bandit on the Christmas present front this year, but we can't wait to see her rip/eat/slobber on all of them next year.

(Our 31 week picture in front of the tree turned out ridiculously goofy so you just need to use your imagination on what we look like. One hint - I'm round).

Even though we're grown up, one of the best things is getting to bust out all of the presents so we still couldn't resist heading to the beach the first chance we got to play with the new toys:

Scuba Steve sighting

We made our way back up to LA for New Year's to ring in 2013 with this crazy cast of characters. We enjoyed some good food, good laughs and a passionate debate about the 'hotness' level of Taylor Swift and Jenny McCarthy (for the record, some of us did not enjoy this). And to everyone's (or no one's since they were sleeping) surprise, I just happened to make it all the way to 1 am, I guess this no sleep thing is starting to pay off already.

2013!!

On a random note, over a year ago Mark was acting as the broker while selling my Grandparent's house for my parents. It turned out to be a cumbersome process (multiple escrows) so he mentioned more than once it would be nice if I had my salesperson's license so I could push papers while he's at work since working from home lets me be more flexible. So, like a good wife I signed up for the classes, but like a bad wife I put off actually taking the test until the house was sold and gone. Whoops. Most people have Europe or other fun things on their baby bucket list but getting this real estate monkey off my back has become a priority before having another monkey on my front comes in to play. So I signed up for the final exam and decided to give it the old college try and in true college form I waited until the last minute to cram for the test. I don't know if taking a big test like this is advisable while pregnant (not sure my brain cell works quite as well as it once did) but by some miracle I passed!  And no, I am not planning a career change, just looking to get a leg up on the next trivia game if nothing else.