2016's Final Blogging Stretch

Last year I had to write 19 posts on Dec. 31st to reach my goal of 215 posts in 2015. The goal is considerably lower this year (116 posts), so I have to write only 10 more after this post, and I've got two days to do it! And the good thing is that I have a lot to say, so it should be easy. I'll start with a look back at the past week.

Quick holiday trip update:
After we arrived here in Montreal last Friday, I spent nearly three days cooking for three families (13 people). The meals were relatively simple ones, but I was the main person cooking. K's uncle's wife helped to clean lot as did my husband and my sister-in-law, who was also in charge of setting the table and decorating on Christmas Eve.

We decided to do our Secret Santa and open presents on Christmas Eve because on Sunday K and his brother took their uncle's family on a driving tour to show them Montreal. It was really cold and most everything was closed, so it didn't take them too long.

They left on Monday and I spent many hours at the outlet helping my sister-in-law with her Boxing Day (more or less equivalent to Black Friday in the U.S.) shopping excursion (she took advantage of the holiday promotional prices to buy things for her mom to take to Brazil).

Since then we've been mostly staying up late and sleeping in, then playing board games and going out to eat, first to an all-you-can-eat sushi place and then in a Brazilian bakery. We also had to go to stores to return Christmas gifts and K ended up buying a bargain priced snow-board, bindings, and boots for himself!

I am still recovering from a pretty bad sinus infection and my husband also had a nasty cold, but we're much better. The guys (K, his brother and our two sons) were going skiing tomorrow, but the forecast is pretty bad weather for the place where the ski station is located, so I guess they will go on Sunday -- even though we were planning to start driving back then. It looks like we'll have to drive straight back home on Monday (our younger son goes back to school on Tuesday).

Other things we did: I read two books and have started a third one! We watched one movie (the new one about Pelé, the Brazilian soccer player, more on this later) and played lots of games!