Photo-A-Day #1721

Today is Christmas Eve. I am fortunate enough to work for a company that continues to do some fantastic things for employees. They give us Turkeys, Hams and Lasagnas once a year, they throw a yearly company picnic and there is always a company Christmas Party. This year the party was split between two buildings. Since I’ve been with the company 8 years I’d seen the the main party location many times. This year I choose the alternate location and it was very nice.

The food and atmosphere of the part was fantastic. There was sushi and a large amount of shrimp. There was also chowder and butternut squash soup, scallops wrapped in bacon, mini burgers and some very tasty cookies.

After work I came home and set up the webcam and ustream to stream the virtual Christmas here at the BenSpark.com house. I got to work doing some cleaning and also get ready for dinner with the family. We flew through cleaning and then out the door to go to Mass.

Eva was so wonderful in church. She had the people around us laughing and smiling. We sat near friends of mine who were in the same birth class that we were in, their little one is 2 days older than Eva so they had each other to play with.

I love going to our church because the are so open and accepting of children. Children can be children and it is okay. They even have a children’s choir and after Mass is over and right before we are dismissed the place gets very quiet and out comes Santa. Santa crosses over to the Nativity scene kneels down and prays and then leaves. The place gets silent. The children are so mesmerized by what they’ve just seen.

After Mass we came home and had a delicious dinner with Mom, Dad, Uncle Jim, Auntie Tara, Uncle Ek and eventually Uncle Mike and later his Mom. Allison made her famous Christmas Chicken Stew that everyone could enjoy. The meal was gluten free too. She also made gluten free cookies and some regular ones as well. The whole meal was delicious.

I kept the ustream going all through dinner so that we could share our meal with our in-laws Dan and Marcia. You see, I set up a Virtual Christmas site for them so that they could be a part of what we were up to. I wrote a second post for Dad-O-Matic called Creating a Virtual Christmas. In the post I outlined how I would set up a blog to keep Allison’s Parents up to date with what we were doing for Christmas and Evan try and include them in some live activities using Ustream and Qik. I had some bumps until I figured the right e-mail to use to post photos. You can see the virtual Christmas site at Christmas with BenSpark.com.