Aut Seven

Happy New Year one and all. We hope you've had a wonderful holiday season with joy, hope and fun.

The Swansons have spent most of the holidays in St. Peter. We hosted Christmas Eve dinner with my parents John and Mikey, my brother Matt, uncle Mikkel and Axel's Granny Dawn. We had a great dinner with fruit soup (frukt suppe), sweet potatoes, beef tenderloin, lefse, cheesecake, and asparagus. There were pickled beets and herring for the truly Scandahoovian-but we stopped short of the lutefisk. Since I'm not technically Norwegian and I'm married to a Swede, I decided it wasn't a requirement. We had a wonderful evening eating and laughing. Axel was on his best behavior, and didn't steal anyone's dinner.

Yesterday St. Peter was visited by old man winter who had plenty to say and left us with about seven inches of snow. Axel loves the snow and spent a lot of time yesterday afternoon running around and trying to fetch snowballs. Last night we dropped in at the neighbors, Craig & Julie Bitters, for a New Years party. We received the red carpet treatment by means of a personally snow blown path between our front door and theirs.

2006 was the year of the indoor home improvements and 2007 will be the year of the outdoors. Mike gets the week between Christmas and New Years off, so he decided to paint the bathroom. It looks great and we're just working on getting some of our pictures from the North Shore framed to put on the walls. Now the only room left to be painted is the guest room.

Plans for outside this coming spring include more landscaping and getting a fence erected for Axel. The height of said fence is to be determined, as our furry friend continues to grow and routinely leaps from a standing position to five feet in the air.