Merry Christmas, my friends!
What a wonderful Advent season we've been having so far - lots of cookie making, Christmas decorating and celebrating the season with family and friends. This month has been extra crazy as I've been assisting with stage managing a show at a local theatre and just finished up my ASL classes. The ASL classes were interesting. I've not had formal sign language classes before so learning proper grammar was a bit daunting. My advantage was learning sign language through immersion when acting with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in college. The folks at the New York School for the Deaf were great though and I'm looking forward to taking the final level of classes in the spring. Too bad there aren't more levels in this program! Its so easily to lose reception skills when you aren't regularly signing.
What a wonderful Advent season we've been having so far - lots of cookie making, Christmas decorating and celebrating the season with family and friends. This month has been extra crazy as I've been assisting with stage managing a show at a local theatre and just finished up my ASL classes. The ASL classes were interesting. I've not had formal sign language classes before so learning proper grammar was a bit daunting. My advantage was learning sign language through immersion when acting with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in college. The folks at the New York School for the Deaf were great though and I'm looking forward to taking the final level of classes in the spring. Too bad there aren't more levels in this program! Its so easily to lose reception skills when you aren't regularly signing.
By far what I've been spending most of my time outside of work doing is stage managing for the local theatre. The cast and crew are so wonderful and we're doing the most hilarious farce - Is He Dead? by Mark Twain - which will go up in January. Keep an eye out for the leg and eyeball props I made for the show, I'm pretty proud of them =)
Luckily Andrew and I were able to get in some solid cookie baking time a few weekends ago. When Andrew was a kid his family normally made 1200-1400 cookies over the course of one weekend - 15-20 varieties. That blows my mind! So of course Andrew has brought the cookie making tradition to our household as well. We did not make quite as many as Andrew's family growing up, but it still took us all day. In the end we made four varieties - Italian sesame seed, M&M, peanut butter blossom, and bones - around 400 in total! Maybe one day we'll build up to the cookie making machine legacy of 15-20 varieties!
Luckily Andrew and I were able to get in some solid cookie baking time a few weekends ago. When Andrew was a kid his family normally made 1200-1400 cookies over the course of one weekend - 15-20 varieties. That blows my mind! So of course Andrew has brought the cookie making tradition to our household as well. We did not make quite as many as Andrew's family growing up, but it still took us all day. In the end we made four varieties - Italian sesame seed, M&M, peanut butter blossom, and bones - around 400 in total! Maybe one day we'll build up to the cookie making machine legacy of 15-20 varieties!
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Next came the house decorating - inside and out! It was a slow process decorating our house inside. We surprisingly little Christmas decorations compared to all the fall ones. We bought a few new pieces - the wreath above the fireplace and the wooden star on the picture window.
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We did get a new ornament - "First Christmas in Our New Home" which I love. Its porcelain which makes me nervous if it drops, but so far so good. It helps not having pets that run around the house and ram into the tree.
And then it began to snow for the first time EVER (in the new house)! We, of course, ran outside and took a million picture of our house in the snow. I'm sure our neighbors were shaking their heads at us. Well if they didn't think we were crazy for decorating our house's outside the day after Thanksgiving, then taking a ton of picture in the snow shouldn't surprise anyone.
And, of course, I had to get a few pictures of Andrew shoveling the driveway for the first snow of the season!
Wishing you a wonderful advent season and a wonderful Christmas. We'll share some Christmas Day photos with you soon!
Love,
Meghan and Andrew
Love,
Meghan and Andrew