The Big Green Egg

Matt's new toy has been the Big Green Egg. It is a ceramic charcoal grill/smoker. I have been the lucky recipient of many delicious smoky meats :). I thought I needed to let you all laugh with us as I document our experiement to make pizza on the Egg.
Supposedly, the Egg makes a fantastic brick oven due to the 750 degree temps. We didn't know the corn meal turned into literal fire at such high temps. We threw it on the stone in the grill and witnessed a small explosion.
As you can see, we went through 2 pizza stones on this "experiment"--an expensive experiment.

Birthdays

I just looked at the Master Birthday list from 2007 and we are missing Henry, Sam, and Grace. Could you post the birthdays so I can update my list?

The Lemon Tree

Just a little sunshine for you winter. My lemon tree is finally in bloom. It started to bud just before Christmas and we thought that we would miss the blossoms, but fortunately lemon trees are extremely slow to bloom. Alan gave me this lemon tree back in March as a late birthday present. I had wanted one ever since seeing that Thomas Jefferson had one at Montpielier. I planned my bedroom decor around the future lemon tree and when it arrived it fit perfectly. On first appearance we were a little worried. The lemon tree appeared like a 1 cm thick stick, about 3 feet tall with 9 smaller sticks sticking out of it, and thorns! It remained this way until about September when it finally sprouted four tiny branches that grew over the next few months and started producing large lovely green leaves. It is an odd looking tree and I had started to believe it would never amount to much, but then it started budding....and oh did it bud. We have tons of buds. Every so often I take my q-tip and play the bee, pollinating from one flower to the next. Our only concern now is how these tiny branches will ever support a lemon. They can barely support a bud. The flowers smell amazing, and we hope they add a little sunshine to your winter. We love you.

The silly pose :)

OK, I was closing out the blog and pictures and saw this picture again and couldn't resist posting it. It made me laugh that Steve and Adam are mirror images of each other. However, I do believe dad won for the silliest face.

More Holiday Fun....

Happy New Year...New York Time! Little did we know at the time, this turned out to be our official celebration of the New Year. There's nothing like a little pan banging to bring in the
New Year.

Wow. That's about all I can say is Wow.

Amanda has their full attention. What a storyteller.

Dad with Henry.

The Welsh's are a good lookin' group!

Holiday Fun

The art of playing chimes requires different methods from each individual. Notice how Christy seriously concentrates on the notes while Matt's approach is just closing his eyes and feeling the music.

After several "sour" notes, we decided we needed a little more practice.

The full cast. Amanda, that head wrap is very chic.

What little angels they are!

Matt, Lindsay, and Preston went with mom and dad to visit Grandma Hill. They had a great visit.

Partial Family Picture

As you can see, some of our favorite people are missing in action in this picture (Lindz/Alan, Ang/Jed, and our favorite uncle Chris). I was glad that we at least got a photo of who was there at mom and dad's that night. We sure had a great visit with all of you. We really are thankful for our wonderful family.