Catch up Christmas post...

Here's a few pictures from the past couple of weeks since we got back from Croatia.

Kenny has LOTS of help putting up the tree and so far the tally on broken ornaments is Lola - 2, Jack - 3.

For those of you who don't know, I broke Lola's leg about a month ago (long story, but I was trying to help her over the fence to play with Betty, she squirmed and got her leg caught in fence). The guilt has been overwhelming, but it's been made worse by the fact that she's had to go through two surgeries. The first was to put in a plate, but then her leg was starting to curve. She had a second surgery to try and straighten it and then use an external fixator. My poor, sad puppy (actually she acts just like her normal, wild self, but with a bandage).

This past Saturday we drove to a Christmas market in St. Wendel that had a live nativity and then on to a town in France that is famous for it's blown glass ornaments. You can tell in the first picture that Luc is not feeling well....more on that later.

Here's a Hotel in the town in France named after Luc, first and last initial, and my purchases.

And finally, here are the boys decorating Christmas cookies. Good thing they are only for our family because every time I turned my back Jack was licking his frosting off or pouring the sprinkles from the container into his mouth.

Right after these pictures I had to take Luc to the hospital for an ear infection. All of you that think universal health care (aka socialized medicine) is such a great idea for the US truly need to live in a socialized medicine country for a while. Finding a doctor on a Sunday night at 9:00 was darn near impossible (the doctor in the ER wasn't a pediatric doctor, thus couldn't take a look in Luc's ear and write a simple antibiotic prescription). Then when I did find a "house doctor" in some other building to look at him, he wrote my prescription on a plain piece of sticky note paper with instructions to give him the antibiotic twice a day, "3.75 spoon." Do any of you know what that means? A soup spoon, a serving spoon, a teaspoon? There was no phone number, no other instructions and no spoon in the box. Thank goodness for the Internet and a friend that was a pharmacy tech. I'm ordering an otoscope on EBay because I'm pretty sure I could diagnose my kids quicker and more accurately. The problem is now going to be forging the prescriptions, but wait, I do have a pad of sticky notes!