Christmas in a NutShell

We had a great Christmas in Ojai this year with Mama and Papa Rigby, Jana, Dave and Zola. We drove down Christmas Eve and had to be back for church on Sunday, so it was a quick one, but we enjoyed every minute.

We got up early Christmas morning to sounds of the kids trying really hard to be good and quiet in their room. There were WAY too many presents this year (I don't know how that happens). Hopefully we can remember this next year, when we are shopping for too many things again.

Christmas dinner was done Santa Maria style with tri-tip and garlic bread, with Salmon and a few other things thrown in for good measure. Yummy!

We continued to eat way, way too much the whole weekend, but it was SO worth every bite. On a healthier note, the tangerines were DELICIOUS this year. I love this time of year when the tangerine tree is overflowing and we get to eat as many as we can handle. (I really need to be better about taking pictures to document stuff...this would be a great place for a picture of the tree...it really was FULL this year)

Here are some pictures of the festivities in no particular order (you know how I stink at this whole posting pictures in the right order thing!):

The next day we headed to Ventura for some serious thrifting. It was great...Grandpa watched Ty and Kelsie so that Dal and I could ride the bikes to Ventura. I have always wanted to do it, but never gotten around to it. It was a little on the cold side at first, but really fun. We, of course, let Jana and Dave ride back home (uphill) and drove back with Mama Rigby.

We love that we got to see the Lunts for a few days...Zola is a cutie! And love that we had Mama and Papa Rigby back this year for Christmas. We realized, more than usual, this year how incredibly blessed we really are. We are grateful for the innumerable blessings we receive every single day of our lives, including all the amazing people in our lives. What a great life we have!

Yep...still here!

Okay...so it has been pointed out to me (by many, many people) that I have neglected my blog for quite some time now. I know. I apologize and promise to do better. The holidays were extremely busy in the Rigby household and it is just barely calming down. To tell you the truth...I don't even have very many great pictures to show.

For Thanksgiving, we visited Shauna (Dal's sister) and Jeff and clan up in the Seattle area. We left with Papa Rigby the Wed. night before Thanksgiving and arrived Thursday night. We had a great Thanksgiving feast the next day! We had a great time seeing the sites and hanging out with the boys. We got to see Nick play basketball, Chase became Kelsie's best friend and Zack and Ty had fun playing. They were great hosts and were cracking us up the whole time.

To keep the peace in our family, I will not write about the ride home. Okay...I will just a little bit and hope Dal doesn't get on here and read for a while. It took us about 17 hours to drive up to the Cardon's house which was fairly enjoyable. We added an additional 10 (yes, that is a 1 and a 0) hours to the drive home so that we could see the Oregon coastline. Yes it was beautiful and it was cool to see the red woods, but we live by the ocean...pretty much the same as what we saw and the big trees weren't any where close to worth TEN additional hours in a cramped car. I will stop there because I don't want to say something I will regret. I was bratty and grumpy the whole second day of our drive home and I am not proud of that. It's a good thing that we had such a great time while we were there. I might think about doing it again (minus the Oregon coast).

Unfortunately, I forgot the pack the camera, so we have nothing. Jeff took some pictures on his phone for us, but I don't have them yet. Which reminds me...Jeff and Shauna, could you send us those pictures, please? Thanks!So this becomes a lame post due to the lack of pictures, which hopefully will be remedied soon. You all might be wishing you hadn't asked for me to post not, huh? To make up for it, I will include some random pictures of my cute kids...