Holidays 2025

When I left off in my last post I had just recently injured my ankle and we had gotten two new cats in the house!

Unfortunately a few weeks into November as I was just starting to feel like I was healing enough from the ankle injury that I didn't think about it all the time, I got a rash on my ribcage. I thought maybe I was having an allergic reaction to something so I tried some benadryl cream and gave it a few days. Then a few more areas of rash appeared further up my ribcage going towards my back so I went into the urgent care. Diagnos SHINGLES! What the what? I guess in my mind 44 year old women didn't get shingles. I really thought it was an older person thing (sorry!). After talking with some friends and coworkers I saw that it wasn't super uncommon to get it at my age, however, most people said it was brought on by stress or big illnesses. I mentioned my ankle but it didn't quite seem to make sense.

Then less than a week later a co-worker of mine who does my choir with me and sees the same rotation of students that I do came down with shingles too! Her doctor suggested that it was more likely that a student came to school with chickenpox and activated our shingles, since the likelihood of the two of us independently getting shingles within a week of each other was a pretty wild coincidence. So.. thanks a lot chickenpox kid. I did have one student come up to me, itchy and covered in red bumps asking if she could go to the nurse, to which I immediately said yes! :::eyeroll:::

You guys, SHINGLES is insane. You can't treat the rash. You treat the virus to help stop it from replicating and hope it doesn't cause permanent nerve damage. That pain plus the ankle = a very not happy Laura right in the middle of the busy December performance season. It wasn't until Christmas break that I started feeling human again. Even now (in february as I type this) I still get flare ups of nerve pain during times of stress or exhaustion. Yay.

But the holiday rush moves on and we made music and memories despite the illnesses! (dan got a pretty terrible something or other too and we were miserable together)

Even though we had just been in Boise for Kristina's Halloween party, we made the journey back to Boise for Thanksgiving. I swear there's always something plaguing me when I'm in boise. For Halloween I was freshly injured and for Thanksgiving I was freshly shingled!  Still always good to spend time with family and have a little break from routine.

The day after we got back from Boise we went and cut down our Christmas tree and at least got it displayed before it got decorated. It was either that our it would be a week or two before we even had a tree up due to the performance season beginning!

Dan had several performances with the Army Band, and I'm always so pleased when our schedules work out so that I can come to watch them!

My choir and 5th grade band both had performances in December that went really well!

SOGO did their annual HOHO in which Alex performed and I led a percussion ensemble. Alex was recognized as a Senior for his last HOHO and he proudly yelled out 'that's my mom' to the whole audience when I got up to conduct <3

I did take a random day off in the middle of the December crazy because I just was getting so run down from the SHINGLES and I knew I had a lot more to go. I felt I needed a recuperation day, so Alex and I made cookies! (this is better than last year when we never had time to do them and ended up doing them in January after Christmas!)

I expected our kitten to do a lot worse with the Christmas decorations. She has done worse with other things since, but Christmas-wise, she did well. I guess we can accept this really cute picture under the tree!

Cade came back in town! Here's the Whole Fam Damily at church the Sunday before Christmas.

On Christmas Eve we held our annual Christmas games. This year Dan and I created some Amazing Race activities and whoever finished got first prize and bragging rights (since second prize was the same as first). They had to complete a puzzle, find a tiny marked piece of pasta amongst a whole lotta pasta, and then recreate a configuration of playing cards where the example was in the garage in the dark and then they had to duplicate it upstairs on the kitchen table. Alex won and they were both good sports about the torture, lol. 

Christmas morning is always a joy just spending time together, watching each other open the things we took time putting together. And of course, cinnamon rolls.

Stockings and Treats

Alex gifted Dan a quarter arcade. It's a fully function 1/4 size arcade of one of his favorite childhood games, Bubble Bobble

Alex finally got an NES for Christmas. Here he is playing his favorite game, Mike Tyson's Punch Out

Dan gifted me SIX of these Unidragon wooden puzzles, with a full on scavenger hunt in the house to find each one. We've been puzzling ever since. Here's the first one :)

Instead of traveling this year during the holidays we decided to gift ourselves some escape rooms. It's one of our favorite activities so we managed 4 different rooms over a few days down near Portland. Proud to say we escaped all of them and only needed a hint in the first room because we didn't think you were allowed to touch the artwork on the walls, but that's where half the clues were! (most escape rooms we've done strongly remind you not to remove anything from the walls...)

One of Dan's gifts to me, and really the whole family, was a glass blowing class. Here's each of us in action! We got do decide what we wanted to make from a selection of items, and had say in the coloring and style as well. It was a REALLY fun evening and I highly recommend giving it a try.

We got dinner afterwards at Insert Coin, our local retro video game arcade and restaurant. The boys spent A LOT of time with this one:

Here's how our glass items turned out!!

It was a busy holiday season, but thankfully all the injury and sickness was over and done by the time we were wanting to enjoy our holiday break. 

Oh, and guess what other awesome thing started to happen over the holidays? Lace, the mama cat finally started coming around. It only took 2 months, but she now roams freely through the house and sits in our laps, plays with the kitten and doesn't scare us half to death anymore! We are actively working on finding a low-cost spay option since they are both in heat a lot and drive us crazy with their meowing and whatnot. We'll get there, one day at a time :)