UPDATE!

Again, I am so very behind. I don't even remember what has been happening recently. The Stonebrakers came to visit the weekend before Christmas. Melinda (my sis), Zoe (niece) and I went to a Holiday Gift Fair and the grocery store on Saturday morning. Zoe insisted that Price Chopper was not a grocery store. That is, until we went inside. We could not explain to her that there are grocery stores other than Fareway. Saturday evening we watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation which Ryan had purchased from the Wal-Mart for us. Mel and I had never before seen the non-TV version of this movie. We had missed a lot of really good parts. Just kidding. Sunday was Lea's first birthday. Mel dressed her in the nice Christmas dress James' mom bought for Asa before he was born. (We didn't know if he was a boy or girl.) The girls and kids went to church. The boys were heathens and went to the KC Chiefs game. Ryan is a sports editor at a newspaper in Iowa and had requested press passes. Instead of sitting in the -12 wind chills, they sat in a press box and ate lots of free food! Meanwhile, Zoe was making a new friend, Melinda was in Sunday School by herself making new friends as I was in the nursery with Asa, Lea, Judah and several other babies. Mel and I did get to go to the regular service together. It was a great Christmas service with the traditional Christmas hymns sung in a non-traditional style. I loved it! After church we took Lea to Burger King for her birthday. Zoe brought her friend Emma. I am good friends with Emma's parents, so it wasn't totally random. We chose BK because of the play land. Asa especially enjoyed crawling around in his limited area.
Just to let you know exactly how cold it was, Asa knocked over my soda in the van and a little spilled on the floor right by the door. When I opened the door at home, the soda was frozen. That's right, frozen. I couldn't believe the coldness!
Anyhow, we didn't do a whole lot Sunday afternoon. I took Emma home and wrapped presents. When the guys got home, we started making dinner. After dinner Lea got her Happy Birthday Pumpkin Pie. She loved it:

Then she opened her present with a little help:

One of my favorite things about having my sister in town is when we just sit around, drinking coffee and eating random snacks and play games. So much fun! And we did that some more Sunday night.
Oh, in the night Sunday, James and I woke up to a funny sound. Someone was in the shower and Lea was crying. As it turns out, Lea got sick and had thrown up on Melinda. Lea ended up throwing up several times. They still left Monday morning, but later than planned. After they left, I had a lot of laundry to catch up on and did my best to kill the germs left in our house.

Tuesday I went over to a friend's house to stay with her daughter while she was at work. The only inconvenience was that I kind of needed to be home packing for Christmas in Iowa. The weather Tuesday wasn't the greatest. We were watching the forecast and it looked like it would be worse for travel on Wednesday. We decided to drive up to Iowa Tuesday night after James got home from work. Our original plan was to head up on Wednesday morning. James and I got home about the same time and started packing. Our van was full of stuff that was just thrown in. We took both dirty laundry and unfolded laundry with us. I'm glad we were just going to visit family since we were so unorganized! The trip was pretty good. It only took about 15 minutes longer than normal. James said that he drove extra fast when the roads were clear since we would probably have to drive slowly later in the trip. We did find some adverse driving conditions took it slow. The boys were very good; we didn't have to stop for them. It helps that the drive was only 4 hours. Much shorter than our previous 19 hour trip to Arizona!