We just had a wonderful Christmas holiday with two of our three grown children. It was the first big holiday when we haven't had all three children back home. While we really missed our third child, it did give us some really nice quality time with the other two.
With all of us just having spent the Thanksgiving with our missing daughter and granddaughter, we were okay with the unusual and very peaceful holiday.
The nice thing about having a quiet holiday is that you get a chance to learn once again about the talents of your children.
We are truly blessed with three wonderful children. They are hard working and each have some very interesting things about their lives that a casual observer might miss.
Our oldest daughter is very smart, very talented with her hands, and a sharp shopper. This year she made our two year old granddaughter a pair of Christmas pants. She also helped with the shopping for her mother who is notoriously difficult when it comes to gifts.
Our son loves to build things, he bought a wonder toy for our granddaughter and spent over an hour putting it together. He is also a computer whiz.
It would be hard to class me as a technophobe, but he is on a different level from me. He looked at my home network and pronounced it a rat's nest.
His hand-me-down equipment and expertise turned my network into a much more reliable place to accomplish work. He also took some time to check out our computers and make certain they were in good shape.
His efforts spurred me to take some time with my wife's laptop. Over the last few months she has asked a number of time for her complete old address book from her ancient aluminum PowerBook somehow get moved to the HP laptop that I bought her last winter.
I finally figured out how to do it. I went into her Apple address book, selected all of the vCards and did an export. I saved it to her new Dropbox account, and then imported it into Gmail. I also moved over her recipe mailbox at the same time.
I think my wife was more pleased with her complete address book finally making it her new laptop than anything she got for the holidays perhaps with the exception of her new long underwear.
When our children pulled into the driveway on Christmas eve, they were expecting a continuation of our homemade soup night tradition.
They were truly surprised to find pot roast, gravy, mashed potatoes, and carrots for dinner. It was just the first of my home cooked delights. While we had a couple of meals away from home, the home cooking certainly made for a wonderful holiday. I especially enjoyed the broccoli casserole cooked by our daughter.
Our son was even asking for family breakfasts.
Our oldest daughter is also great with animals. My wife mentioned a couple of times of how it was to have someone to help with our ailing cat.
It was a very nice holiday with everyone contributing from their bag of talents.
I didn't even mind doing dishes.
