New Year’s Visitors

One day Candice was talking with our very dear friend Tiffani, and they were discussing the sad fact that we had taken absolutely zero photos of Tiffani with Asher when we attended her wedding in November. They started joking about how fun it would be to spend New Years together… and what do you know?! The next morning when Candice and I woke up, our phones were abuzz with messages from Curby saying that they were buying plane tickets to come over here! A few hours or so later, Tiffani and Curby scored major “awesome points” by sending us the confirmation that they had, in fact, purchased plane tickets to come see us on New Years!

We were excited for many reasons, not least because our friend Rachael had planned a fun “Chopped” New Year’s Eve, and we were pumped to get our friends in on the competition. But most of all, we were thrilled to get to spend some good quality time with Tiffani and Curby, since during their wedding, as it is with all weddings, there was very little down time for hanging out and doing nothing with your friends.

In preparation for their visit, Asher donned his UCLA football shirt that he got from his Auntie Tiff…

We had a very low-key visit with them, which was a nice follow-up to the holiday hubbub (not that our holidays were particularly hubbubly). I always hate it when Christmas is over because you have that terrible after-Christmas letdown and it’s no longer “crisp and magical” outside, it’s just “cold and gray.” We made good food together, walked around Cambridge, visited a couple of ye-olde-English pubs, and had a rockin’ New Year’s Eve.

We walked into town wearing fun hats…

… we discussed important issues, like why we believe jackets with those shoulder loop things are superior to regularly shouldered garments.

We ate cinnamon rolls together on New Year’s day. We had some frozen from the batch we made before Christmas… they were still just as good and just as fattening. However, the barrage of New Year’s resolution posts from other blogs has me rethinking the whole idea behind eating cinnamon rolls on New Year’s day… it’s not exactly the kind of thing that fits with the “let’s eat healthy this year” mindset. Oh well, that wasn’t one of my resolutions anyway… and, in any case, I think you’re not really supposed to start doing the resolutions until week 2, right?

On the last day of the visit, we went to Anglesey Abbey (a National Trust site close to Cambridge) and saw the “Winter Garden” with the “Himalayan silver birch trees” (photo courtesy of Tiffani Piehl). It was good English fun despite the somewhat muddy state of the countryside.

It was a great visit. We were extremely happy to see our friends, and Asher was very happy to hang out with Aunt Tiffani and Uncle Curby