Christmas in Boston
It was so great to go home for Christmas this year. It did take us 14 hours to get there, but it was well worth it. We were busy the whole week we were there and came home needing a vacation from the vacation!

Christmas Eve was at my parent's house this year. Our family's Christmas Eve tradition is eating veal parmesan. As far as I can remember my grandmother has always cooked this meal and now we are carrying on her tradition. My mom and I spent most of the morning of Christmas Eve cooking all the food: chicken, veal and eggplant parmesan.


Thanks Mom for the earrings! I love them and they mean a lot to me.Matt and I went on some of our favorite runs while we were in Boston. This was the view of the lake in Wakefield on our first morning run. It was 9 degrees outside and a bit chilly for us Californians.
We spent time visiting relatives. We had lunch at my Grandmother's house and saw my Great Aunts Flo Flo and Elsie.

One of the highlights of our trip to Boston was catching up with good friends. We got to hang out with Bob and Lisa since they were home in NJ for Christmas. It was so great to see them. We had not seen them since our moving truck left Gainesville. While they were visiting we did some of our favorite things such as getting ice cream and going running.

We also got to catch up with Lisa and David. We had not seen them since Patrick and Katie's wedding almost 3 years ago. It was great to see them again.

The Renoni family also came over and we enjoyed some pizza and Catch Phrase. My parents have been friends with the Renoni's for over 25 years. We are very grateful for their friendship. Even though we only get to see each other a couple times a year we pick up right where we left off.

Thanksgiving in Dallas, TX
This year the Buman family spent Thanksgiving at Mark and Julie's house in Texas. It was a crazy week with everyone (23 total) in one house. There was always something going on to entertain you: football, puzzles, board games, riding bikes, hot tubbing, napping (for us with no children), running, drinking beer and of course eating. Mark and Julie created a spread sheet to help organize sleeping, cleaning, and eating arrangements. The night of Thanksgiving we took out a record 10 bags of trash.

Here are all the pictures I took from Thanksgiving. I was just playing around with the latest version of Picasa!
This is what happens after only 1 day of playing all day long.

This was the ever growing pile of shoes that continued to take over the entry way.
Valeri and I were in charge of making dinner one night. We made spaghetti and meatballs with steamed broccoli and salad. Here we are forming our 40 or so meatballs.





Paul cooked one of the 3 turkeys we ate for Thanksgiving in a Dutch Oven. It was so good. Thanks for all the work Paul!
Here Julie and Valeri are making sandwiches for 23 people.

Every day the Buman brothers went running together as part of their training for the Big Sur Marathon they will run in April.

Christian and Keegan are quite the studs with this hairdo.
Here are the 2 newest members of the Buman family - Kyla and Kaitlyn.

One of the highlights of our trip to Texas was being able to see Sean and Laura. It was great to catch up with them.

PCC Small Group Thanksgiving

We celebrated Thanksgiving with our NorCal small group at our house. I had to work all day, so Matt volunteered to cook the turkey while working from home. He did a fabulous job! Everyone contributed something to the meal and it was awesome. Thanks guys.
Doesn't that bird look delicious?
Here are our new friends! (from L to R Janet, Meredith, Bethany, Tim, Matt, Heather, Chris and Matt) Cheers!

Cannondale Bad Boy XL

Here is Matt's sweet new bike! Before he bought it he had been commuting to Stanford on a mountain bike which was very annoying. So Matt put his old bike on Craig's List and sold it and then bought this one. Now he commutes to work in half the time!

Mom and Dad visit San Francisco

Mom and Dad went to wine country and stayed over night in a bed and breakfast to do some wine testing. Matt and I surprised them and had a bottle of wine sent to their room.
Dad and I enjoyed Mom's famous banana bread and cappuccino.

One of the nights we took Mom and Dad to Half Moon Bay to see the Pacific Ocean and enjoyed dinner at Half Moon Bay Brewing Company.
Mom made chicken piccata and Matt made sweet potato fries (our new favorite thanks to Patrick and Katie).
We made some guacamole for Mom and Dad with fresh California avocados. Yum!

Here we are enjoying cappuccino in North Beach, the Italian section of San Francisco. It is quite a disappointment compared to the North End in Boston.

We had a picnic lunch in front of the "painted ladies." What a view!


Here is the puzzle that Mom brought for us to do. She also bought us Red Sox Scrabble!