It's an Idaho Christmas year! We are so excited to spend the Holidays in Idaho. When we are on an Idaho year we always have a pre travel party to celebrate a Cook Christmas. We received a stack of flat rate boxes, got a turkey with all of the fixings, and of course some cranberry muffins with butter sauce. Everybody loved their gifts. Pictured below are some of the festivities. Naiya with her "nuggle" (her word for blanket), Katelyn with her tinkerbell figurines, Kyleigh with her digital camera, Rusty on his hang board (made by Mike out of monkeypod wood), Holly with her BSU Mr. potatoe head, Russ and Mike with their new shoes, the girls playing with their new barbie house and barbies, and the dinner feast. All of the gifts were from the Cook family, except the dollhouse. That was from Rusty and I to the girls. It is kind of a given that you can't take a barbie house on the plane, so we went ahead and gave it to the girls. Rusty spent so much time on this thing and it turned out beautiful. He had saved scraps from several jobs, and had things like handmade wallpaper, tile, oak trim and nice carpet to put inside. I was mostly Rusty's company while he built it, although I did sand all of the oak trim, puttied the nail holes and learned how to countersink finish nails. We had almost decided we didn't have enough time to get it done, but went for it anyway. Rusty has been working on it every morning at 5 and every night after the girls went to bed. We finished Saturday afternoon, the day before our party. His hard work was rewarded with the girls' excitement. They played with it the rest of the night and the next morning Kyleigh woke Katelyn up playing barbies too loud. Then I walked in their room just in time to see Katelyn roll out of bed directly onto her knees and start playing with Kyleigh. It was great. We loved all of our gifts, but miss getting them directly from the hands of the givers. It is hard to always be missing one family at Christmas but we are grateful that they are mindful of us and so thoughtful as to send us such nice gifts. Thanks to the Cook family. We love you!