Guess it might be good to post at least one more time before 2008 ends! We've been back in Yankton since Friday, but I haven't caught up with anything yet, including laundry. We had a really nice time with family and friends but are always glad to be back home, which is probably a good sign. I would post pictures, but our niece Mariah accidentally grabbed our camera because our cameras are almost identical. Hopefully we'll have it back in the next few days.

To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to traveling to Mankato mostly because I knew it would probably involve a lot of stops with Tylan. She turned out to be a pretty decent traveler, though. We had to stop a few times both ways when she was unhappy or wanted to nurse, but that's not too bad for a four-month-old traveling four plus hours.

We got to Mankato on Monday not long before supper and didn't do too much. My brother Jeremy and his two kids stopped by for a little bit in the evening. My mom took Tuesday off of work so she could be with us all day. My friend Heather, her husband, and their two kids stopped by in the morning so the kids could exchange gifts. That was a lot of fun as always. Then we went out to our church in the afternoon to help set up for the Christmas Eve service and so the kids could sled. That night we just hung out at home and watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

We didn't do much during the day on Christmas Eve except prepare for the night. Accalia took part in the childrens' service for the first time and had a lot of fun. In previous years she's just been too unsure to get up there with everyone. It would have been even more pleasant if Ella hadn't cried throughout most of the service. I have no idea what was wrong since she was perfectly fine before we came. I don't know if she was actually more tired than she appeared or if she didn't like sitting in the front row in a church filled mostly with strangers or what. We survived, though. It would have been nice to hang around after church a while to talk with everyone, but it was definitely in everyone's best interest to get Ella out of there and back to my parents' house. After that, my brothers came over so we could exchange gifts and stuff our faces.

We were up early and off to Lake Wilson on Christmas Day where we spent the day with Cory's dad, his brother and family, as well as Myron's friend Joan. This part of the visit didn't go as smoothly because we discovered that Cole seems to have allergies to dogs - or at least to Myron's dog. At one point in the afternoon, Cole had buried his head in a blanket that had dog hair on it and Cole's eyes started to itch and water. By night we noticed that Cole was starting to have a little trouble breathing, similar to when he went to the doctor and returned with a nebulizer. It wasn't as bad, though. Unfortunately for us, we didn't have any Benedryl to give him, and there was nothing open where we could go to buy some. We were at the point where we were trying to decide if we should drive home in the middle of the night on dicey roads or take our chances and be prepared to drive him 11 miles to the nearest hospital if his breathing worsened. We ended up staying, picked the room where the dog spent the least amount of time, opened the windows to air the room out, and washed all of the sheets on the beds. His breathing didn't really change throughout the night, although I didn't fall asleep until 2:30 a.m. because I was sitting there watching him breathe. That dog must have some extremely potent dander or something because Cory and I were both having reactions to all of that dog hair and dander by the time we left. It wasn't long before Cole was starting to improve, and by the next day he was completely back to normal. Now we know that we need to travel with Benedryl and definitely have to be prepared whenever we're around that dog again. That doesn't happen very often, though. It hit Cory first that Cole's trip to the doctor that resulted in the nebulizer treatments was probably also partially due to a reaction to the dog since that happened right after Myron had been here for Thanksgiving and we had the dog in the house for a couple days.

It was really nice to be home on Friday, especially because Cory didn't have to go back to delivering pizzas until today. We just hung out the rest of Friday, playing with the Wii, eating pizza, and watching The Dark Knight. Saturday was pretty low key, too. That night we started catching up on episodes of Pushing Daisy, a show that the kids love, too, and are sad to hear has been canceled.

So Cory's been working most of the day today and is scheduled to work until 8 p.m. Hopefully it's slow, though, and he gets out earlier. This coming week will hopefully be pretty quiet, too. The kids don't have any of their regular activities, so the only scheduled thing for us is a chiropractor appointment tomorrow. For New Year's Eve we're all just going to hang out at home and have a bunch of yummy food sitting out. That's apparently our tradition. Cory will have New Year's Day off, so we'll have extra time together this week. Hopefully I'll be able to get some cleaning done with the extra time this week. We shall see!