Santa brought Beth just what she wanted, a new best friend. She named him Bucky after her other best friend who lives in Cincinnati.

Beth also decided to add a Beth’s Favorite Dogs page to the website, in the Special Pages area. She still needs more pictures of some her dog friends.

As if the ice storm wasn’t enough, our house got hit by an unexpected hurricane on Christmas morning. I happened to have before and after pictures:

Before:

After:

Fortunately, nobody was hurt.

We have somewhere to go, it just turned out not to be Cincinnati. Here is everyone all dressed up for the unbearably overcrowded children’s mass:

Is there something familiar about the kids’ outfits? It must just be me.

OK, it’s not that bad, but we are kind of stuck here because of the bad ice storm that hit last night. Jen thinks it’s our new Snoopy flag’s fault. The roads are a sheet of ice, but everything looks amazing.

Of course, all this ice and snow doesn’t mean we can’t go out and play:

We spent a lot of the day today doing Christmas stuff together as a family. “Painting Grandma” is here with us, too. First we went to the ice sculpture show, which was pretty cool (ha ha). Everyone liked it, even though Beth was a little crabby the whole time. Here’s a picture of Grandma and Beth riding in an ice sleigh:

You can see more of these pictures in Gallery 35.

We then took a change of temperature and went into the Opryland Hotel to enjoy the warmer “weather” and see all of their Christmas decorations. Here’s a picture of Jake and Lauren checking out the “Haunted Nativity” (we call it that because last year we went and all three of the kids were terrified for some reason):

You can see more of these pictures in Gallery 36.

We had some fun visitors come for the weekend. The kids were all partied out by Sunday evening. Here are a few pictures from the weekend:

We got our first snow of the year. The kids were pretty excited, even though it was just flurries. Of course that never stopped them from closing schools around here.

This year’s Christmas card picture was much easier to get than Last Year’s. We didn’t even have to cheat this year. I guess a year makes a difference, but you can hardly tell the kids are any different from last year. Here’s a preview of this year’s picture:

You can see some of the other “takes” in Image Gallery 34.

Those of you who haven’t spent much time around this website (there are well over a thousand pictures here) you may want to relive some of the Past Christmas Cards.

Please don’t mention to Jen if you happen to notice that the kids are wearing the same outfits this year that they wore last year. Also, there were lots of great Christmas things in the background, including a wreath and poinsettias that had to be cropped out of the image. Oh well, there’s always next year.

One of Jen’s friends found this picture in Wednesday’s edition of the Tennessean: