Christmas 2006

Jen and I were fortunate enough to spend Christmas 2006 with our families, mainly because we needed to attend the Noah Christmas Party in San Jose. After the company party, we went to Nancy's house for family portraits (read the funny and wacky blog about it here).

We left Nancy's house on Christmas Eve and arrived to the cabin at 1:30 pm. Maminou and Papa (Jen's parents) were happy to see us, but mainly happy to see our cuttie Kaylene! They put up the Christmas tree and we put up the ornaments that Nancy and Sherry got Kaylene for her first Christmas. We spent the rest of Christmas eve just relaxing.

Christmas day was great. Since there wasn't any children anxiously awaiting to open their presents, we all took our sweet time getting to the present opening. We finally got to opening the presents. As I mentioned in this previous blog, Jen got me the awesome Canon Digital Rebel XT. Jen opened the gift I got her. Jen had been saying for years that she wanted a rice cooker, so I finally got her one and she's was as happy as a clam! Jen's parents got various presents from their friends and family. They got me a gift card to Target (perfect!) and got Jen a new purse. Jen's mom prepared a wonderful turkey dinner, it was delicious!

The next day at the cabin, Chris and his family arrived later in the day. We opened more gifts and had a wonderful pork tender-loin dinner and spent the rest of the evening relaxing and socializing.

We had an awesome time on the 27th. We spent a-lot of the time doing one of my favorite activities: Gaming! Chris has become an excellent competitor and even taught me more about UT-2004!

On the 28th, my family or at least most of my family finally arrived to the Yurts in Yosemite, Nancy's family, Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, Tony and Sherry's family minus Eddie. One of the main reasons Grandma and Grandpa decided to come (according to them) was to see our new little precious Kaylene. Grandpa was very emotional at meeting Kaylene and could barely get out these words, speaking to Jen "You know she is part of 5 generations of living Wharff's". Grandpa was so happy, that he asked me if I could take a picture of Grandma "B", who is my 104 year old Great-Grandmother and Kaylene's Great-Great-Grandmother and incorporate it with a picture of Grandma, Mom and Jen into one picture. I spent the remainder of the evening working on this picture for Grandpa.

We spent all day the 29th in Yosemite. We did lot's of site-seeing and froze our butts off eating lunch, but that didn't stop us from having fun. Afterwards we hiked on over to Curry village so the kids could ice skate with Half Dome as a back-drop.

The 30th was snow day! We went to Cranes Flat in Yosemite so all of us could play in the snow, sledding, hiking and snow ball fights! We all took turns sledding down the hill and since it wasn't exactly new powder-like snow, for those of us that are older, it HURT! So we decided to hike down a trail and find our own hill to sled on, but after hiking with the kids for about a half mile, they got tired, so we stopped and had a 20 minute snow ball fight! It was one of the greatest snow ball fights I've been in. The environment was perfect, the snow was frosty and easy to form snow balls and warm enough to stay warm, actually warm enough that we actually started to sweat! I never felt so comfortable in the snow. It was an awesome day in the snow.

Sad enough, New Years eve was the end of our Christmas vacation and time to go home. We had one last meal together at 2 guys pizza in Groveland and then all went our separate ways home.

All in all, it was an awesome time with both sides of our families and I look forward to next Christmas!

Happy New Years and Love You all.

--Paul