Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all enjoyed the holidays!

Let’s rewind back to Christmas

1. Christmas- We spent Christmas at Greg’s sisters house.  We opened presents when we got there, the boys were going crazy having to wait for us!

Greg got me a new passport holder with my initials, and 30 Euros were in it for our trip to Munich.

The next present I opened was a piece of paper saying, WE ARE FLYING TO SEATTLE TOMORROW!!!!!  It was seriously the best surprise I’ve ever had.  I was so happy that I would be getting to see my family soon, and spend time with them all since there wasn’t a lot of relaxing and just hanging out when we were there last for the wedding.  I was so happy I would be there for my 30th birthday too. So Munich will have to wait for another time, the temperature was single digits there so maybe it’s better to go when it’s a bit warmer anyway!

We had a nice traditional English Christmas dinner and his Armenian Aunt also brought her famous chicken curry and made the most amazing napoleon for dessert!

I made some homemade eggnog, and we also the famous traditional English Christmas pudding for dessert.

2. Seattle- We landed in Seattle around 8pm on the 26th, and went straight out because my brother’s band had a gig that night.  My other brother and sister were there, they live an hour away so it’s a little harder to see them so it was so nice to have the Shiels Fantastic Four back together!

3. Christmas number 2- My Dad postponed their Christmas until we got there, so we had another Christmas day celebrating on the 27th.  Starting the morning off right with monkey bread!

My dad was able to take the entire time off we were there so it was good to just hang out.  We played Cards Against Humanity, and the standard poker game session.

I was sitting across the table from my brother and sister, they look like twins!

4. The big 3-0. On the 31st, I went out for coffee with my brother’s girlfriend at a cute little local coffee shop, I had a salted maple latte, yum! Greg told me I had to be back by 1130 for another birthday surprise lunch somewhere.  He took my dad, step mom and I to a Brazilian steakhouse, it was so good and of course I had to have a Caipirinha! If you haven’t had one of these it’s like the Brazilian’s version of a margarita, but maybe better?! I’m sure all the sugar they use might have something to do with that.  Once we got back to the house, my dad and Greg planned a surprise birthday party for me and invited all my family over for it.  Unfortunately a lot of them had the flu and couldn’t make it, but it was great spending time with other family.  Since my brothers and sister were staying the night, the drinking games were on! We started with beer pong, and ended with flip cup ringing in the new year! It was definitely one of the funnest New Year’s Eves! We were all a little fragile in the morning and my brother and sister had to go back to Bellingham so I had to say bye to them  😦

Dad and Greg were beer pong undefeated champions!

It was so fun getting to watch Seattle play, and win! in Seattle.  We were at the exact same game last year against St. Louis and would determine if we would make it to the playoffs or not.

My brother and his girlfriend Morgan recently moved into a house together so Greg and I went over to see his house, visit and Greg had to watch the Jon Jones UFC fight.  It was so nice to spend time with them, I can’t wait till we move there when it won’t be such a rare occasion.

We went to Red Mill to get the best bacon cheeseburger ever, hello stack of bacon!

Love seeing the mountain ranges on a clear day!

Our flight was scheduled to leave Seattle at 1130pm on the 4th and we would get back to London 1030pm on the 5th.  We had a to connect in DC, however we keeping getting messages that our flight leaving Seattle was delayed and it kept getting delayed later and later till like 3am! We definitely would have missed our connection, and would have got stuck in DC for like 8 hours so we called United and got them to change our flight to leave out early the next morning, which we did and had a connection in Houston.  Had to get some Mexican food when we were there! Split a burrito, and split Wendy’s.

We landed back in London at 6am on the 6th and thought I’d be able to get some sleep on the flight and then go into work, but no sleep happened and I wasn’t going into work.

5. Interview! I had an interview for a Dietitian’s Assistant position the next morning too, which I had to do a 5 minute presentation for so I needed all the time I could get to practice for that.

Now it is back to work and reality, hope your 2015 is going well!!