I wanted to post this yesterday, but there was a service interuption with Blogger, so they were down all day.

Christmas Eve, we had an open house at my brother's and a lot of the in-laws came over, including some of the lil kiddos. I cooked all afternoon and everyone had a good time.

Christmas morning is the time for opening gifts at my brother's. This is what the tree looked like on Christmas morning.



Emma was thrilled with everything and everybody. She's normally an incredibly happy kid, but this morning she was radiant!



She liked all her toys, (and she got quite a few), but she likes this baby doll a lot.



I think it looks like "Chucky" and it has this very insane sounding laugh. We all find it a little unnerving, but Emma loves it, so it has been with us wherever we go these days.

Christmas day we went over to the in-laws for dinner and had a pleasant evening.

Yesterday we hung around the house, installed a dryer vent and took lots of naps, then went out for dinner at a little neighborhood place.

Today we've got a bunch of errands to do, (including another trip to the Super Stop and Shop!), and tonight, my sister and her lover arrive to complete our family gathering.

Yesterday, everything started out smoothly enough... The New Orleans Airport was not all that busy and check in went fairly quickly. Security was smooth, although they were very interested in my camera bag. Everybody was polite, though. The gate area was largely deserted.





As we took off, I got a nice view of the Mississippi River.



O'Hare in Chicago was full, but not overcrowded and all the flights on the board were On Time. My flight left about 2 minutes late, but made up some time in the air, so we landed in Boston 15 minutes early. And that's when the rest of the day began to go down the toilet!

We sat in the plane for 20 minutes while we waited for someone to attach the gateway to the plane. The luggage was unloaded before we were able to leave it. Then we had to line up and go through a revolving door one at a time to get out of the gate area. There were lots of security people watching us, which was odd, because they hardly ever pay any attention to departing passangers. When I got to the baggage area, there was this guy with no badge or uniform waving his hand in my face and repeating over and over "This area is inaccessible!" He would not answer any question about how I was supposed to get my bags, just kept grinning, waving and repeating the same thing. Logan is and always has been a horribly managed airport, and I was going to get someone to handle this rude guy, when I noticed that there were an awful lot of heavily armed national guard guys, like maybe 60 of them right ahead. I decided to just leave that area of the airport. I finally found someone from American Airlines who was able to get me my bags. When I called my brother to tell him that I had arrived, he told me about the guy on the plane from Paris who had the explosives in his shoes. My bags had been delivered right into the middle of the secured area where they were holding all of the passengers on that flight; I suppose I was lucky to get them at all. Of course, you're always lucky if your luggage makes it through Logan, undoubtably the worst baggage handling in the US.

Well, I got out to the bus area; it was freezing! And then the scheduled 9:45 PM bus didn't come. It had for some unknown reason been canceled and the next bus was at 11:15. My bro decided to make the 40 minute trip into Boston to pick me up and we ended up getting to his house about 12:30. All in all, I had spent about 2 and a half hours at Logan, most of it outside. During it all, I watched the hundreds of soldiers and security people running back and forth through the airport, wild and goggle eyed. It was obvious that no one knew what they were doing and that people that should have been calm and in charge had lost their heads. I mean, this was over nine hours after the plane had landed and the guy with the exploding shoes had been taken away to jail. Wierd finish to an otherwise pleasant day!

This morning when I woke up my lil niece was there to greet me! We all had breakfast together and then got dressed to go shopping for the food we needed for the party tommorow night. Emma was ready first.



We went to the enormous Super Stop and Shop



Emma selected the cart with the cute red car in front for her to ride in and my Dad was selected to steer the huge thing through the crowded store. After a while Emma decided to get out and help us pick things out, so my brother spent the rest of the time chasing her around and putting things back.


We were in the store for over an hour and a half! It just took forever, but we finally got out of there with almost everything we needed and drove back home.



It all just soooo New England here, (not too surprising...), with a little snow, it would just look like a Christmas card.

Tommorow, I've got to put on my Martha Stewart apron and cook for a couple of hours to get ready for the Christmas Eve party. I have some fabulous things planned!