Happy 2011

Hey Everyone!

First of all Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a great and safe time celebrating the holidays. I haven't been on here in a few days (it feels like forever), but I have a good excuse. 



So let me tell you a little bit of what I've been up to these last few days. We were all vacationing in Fl at our parents house for some time now, and we just got back to California a couple of days ago. It's nice to be back home but I do miss my family a lot. On the other hand I have so much to do at home that  I don't have time to be bored. We have been re-arranging the house and doing some serious cleaning since we hadn't been here. Our little boy is crawling now and we have to get every inch of the house spotless!! I'm a major clean freak and have been working non-stop for my house to look sparkling clean again. It's pretty much done for now (although house work is never really done is it?)lol.



Anyway... we had a lot of fun celebrating the holidays at my parents house. It was the first time spending the holidays there since I got married. My daughter loved being around more family, since it's usually just us.

We ate all the wonderful traditional Colombian food and even had novenas every night. I grew up going to  novenas from the 16th to the 24th of December. As a child we would go to a different house every night and prayed a novena there. The hosting family would have delicious Colombian appetizers eaten around the holidays like buñuelos , empanadas , natilla, arroz con leche and much more. The same family was in charge of it every year and a ton of people came. What it is basically is a set of prayers that we say for nine days straight before Christmas. So each day we would go to a different house and say that day's  prayer, sing some Christmas carols and then eat and mingle. It was actually a lot fun. Since then the family who was in charge of the novenas stopped doing them and no one really took over, so my parents decided to do them with a couple of friends and it was very nice. My daughter loved going to the different houses to sing and play with other little kids. We normally have nativity scenes by the Christmas tree during the novenas and we call them pesebres.



Here are some pictures of the different pesebres an novenas from 2010.





This pesebre is from a friend of ours, Rocio. She made her pesebre in a winter style, very elegant and pretty.