I hope everyone had a great Christmas.   We definitely did….we ate too much and had a lot of fun opening the presents that we bought for ourselves on our day of shopping together.  If you missed that blog post, Rich and I wanted to do something different this year to make our stocking stuffer more entertaining.  We had some gift cards with balances that we hadn’t used and set an additional limit of $25 each and a minimum of five items purchased.  We could only spend fifteen minutes in each store and if we had a gift card, we divided the balance in half, and each spent that amount in that store.  We could have spent more and counted it toward the $25, but the gifts bought with gift cards weren’t allowed to be included in the minimum of five items purchased.  We had a great time.  Rich got a cookbook, a brush to clean his gas grill, two books he’s been wanting to read, and some socks.  I bought a Mandala coloring book, chapstick, a Yankee candle car air freshener, and two charms for a bracelet I have.  One was a dog paw print to remind me of Aggie, and the other, a bear that always reminds Rich and me of his dad.

I really recommend doing something different when shopping for a longtime companion/spouse, as it isn’t always easy to find things you think they will like.  This way, we created a fun experience out of something that can be a little frustrating.

I thought Christmas would be hard without Aggie, but she’d been spending so much time alone in our bedroom, that sadly, it was a relief we didn’t have to worry about her while we were visiting friends.  We had bought rug runners for every surface that wasn’t carpeted in our house so Aggie wouldn’t fall.  She still managed to fall, and one day it was particularly horrible, as she fell in our bathroom, and then panicked and had a huge accident everywhere.  We were only gone for an hour that day, and it was about a week before we made the ultimate decision.  It was just too hard leaving her, not knowing if she would lose her balance and panic when we didn’t immediately come to lift her.

We bought lots of fun toys and treats to fill the stockings for our two remaining dogs, and they had a great time snacking and stealing toys from each other.  Surprisingly, all in all, it was a really nice day and I hope yours was too.

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