New Years Eve & Day

Yea, I know. I'm seriously just getting around to it. This is mainly for our extended family that we have been seriously bad at updating, so here you go.

New Years Eve we took the family bowling. We all had a great time and I even managed to eek past Tayeson on the bumper lanes by three points (though he was ahead of me for most of the game)!!! Pretty sad huh?

Here is a pic of the fam minus Lindsay who dropped in after work.

T loves to bowl and as mentioned above, his skills, sadly, almost exceed my own. Side note, whoever invented this little bowling contraption is genius. With the help of this ramp you no longer have to wait 10 minutes for the ball to creep its way down the lane.

See. Seriously, I wasn't kidding when I said he was ahead until the end of the game.

On New Years we went to this great little place called Hop-2-It. They have room full of inflated bouncy equipment for kids (and adults) to play on. Everyone had a great time and we were all super sore the next day.

Eric taking out Tommy.

There was a scout group that showed up at one point. One of the set ups was an obstacle course. T got right in there and raced with the older boys. They all were really sweet to him and would cheer him on whenever it was his turn to race. Believe it or not he actually won most of the races he ran!!!

I think that this may be why he would win. This part of the course is really difficult to get up, so Daddy was always there to toss him over the top for the win.

Here is a shot of everyone.

I think the adults may have had more fun than the kids did.

T and Uncle Matty at the top of the big slide.

Below is some video of some of our races. It was hilarious to watch these huge adults try and make their way through this tiny course.

Congratulations Are In Order

We're so excited that my sister, Jennifer, recently became engaged to Matt. We were lucky enough to meet him and spend some time getting to know him while we were in Idaho. He has our seal of approval and we're really excited for them both. The big day will be sometime this summer.

CONGRATULATIONS GUYS!!!!!

Aren't they so cute together?

I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas

And I got it this year!!!! We woke up to some serious snow. It was so beautiful and peaceful outside. We had a fabulous Christmas with my family this year. We were also lucky enough to have Eric's Mom join us for the Christmas Eve and Christmas festivities. We absolutely loved having her with us. We had Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve and read the story of Christ's birth. As usual, Santa was extra good to everyone this year and T was absolutely spoiled rotten by everyone.

Santa brought Tayeson some of his favorite things in the world. For those of you who know T, I'm sure you can imagine the reaction we got when he saw this train.

Matt and Jen Christmas morning. More on them in a minute.

Santa also managed to find T a watermelon. This was about the only thing he wanted for breakfast.

T has had a blast with his new Viewmaster. This has been great for all of the time we've spent traveling.

Here is the blanket I made for T. I was lucky enough to finish it just in time for Christmas.

Everyone piled on top of each other. We had a great time with our family this year.

Here is the rest of the family. You can see Mom casually ducking out of the picture at the last second, as usual.

Here is one of the trees just over the back fence. It was really snowing. After we finished with presents my Aunt Peggy came over and suggested we all go sledding. We layered on the clothes and headed to a hill just a couple of blocks from my parents' house. We had it all to ourselves and we all had a really great time together.

T and Dad catching some air.

I love the look on his face as he heads straight for the little jump just ahead of him. Despite the look of terror, he had a great time sledding.

He was also really good about hauling his sled back up the hill on his own.

See, I told you he had fun.

We had a great time too. It's been so long since we've seen snow like this.

Here we all are crammed into this tiny sled. Impressive huh?

We made it to the bottom. T didn't want to wait for a picture, he was ready to go again.

Tayeson eventually got tired of walking up the hill and opted for other methods of transportation.

As we got ready to leave my two brothers, Brett and Ryan, and Eric all piled into the same sled to try and catch some air over the jump. Instead they were heavy enough to break it apart.

Here is a shot of everyone at the top of the hill. Thanks for the fun idea Aunt Peg. We all had such a great time.

As you can imagine, at the end of the day T was exhausted. He opted to sleep in the tent that we gave him. In fact, he slept in the tent every night for about a week. Too cute.

T discovering his gifts from Santa Christmas morning.

Pre-Christmas Festivities

On our first night in Twin my youngest brother played in the championship basketball game. Unfortunately, they lost, but Ryan played a great game.

Ryan with the ball.

T loves watching basketball games. However, he is not very fond of the buzzer. Thankfully, we had Dad's earmuffs with us.

Here is Ryan getting his second place medal.

We also had a blast building gingerbread houses with everyone. Tayeson, Lindsay, and Ryan worked on the big house and Brett attempted to assemble the little gingerbread village that my sister found. It was pretty entertaining.

Here is T helping with the assembly.

He had such a great time being around all of his aunts and uncles.

Here is Brett trying to put together the tiny little houses that make up the village. He had quite a time getting the houses to stay together.

He also had multiple mishaps with the icing bag.

Yep, multiple mishaps. I would think that he would realize that you need to close off the open end of the bag before applying pressure. I guess I was wrong. (I love you Brett!!!!)

T had a great time fingering all of the candy before applying it to the house. I'm so glad he doesn't like candy.

He did such a good job decorating the houses.

One of Brett's houses had some structural issues.

And this was how he fixed it. I'm not seeing much promise for a job in the construction business.

And here are Brett's final creations (the ones that actually stayed together).

Quite impressive for a 17-year-old isn't it?

I'm sorry, but I have to pick on him. Because of his lack of skills we had some seriously great laughs. :)

And to be fair to Brett, the larger house also ended up with some structural issues as well. Despite it all, we had a really great time putting them together.

Finally

For those of you who are curious, yes, we did actually make it to Boise after being rerouted to Cincinnati, then to Salt Lake, and finally to Boise. After a three hour wait at the Philly airport, we had an hour layover in Cincinnati, and then an hour and a half delay due to weather in Salt Lake, we finally made it to Boise at 5:30, a mere five and a half hours after our original arrival time!!!! Needless to say, it was an extremely long day.

We spent our first week in Boise at Eric's mom's house. We had a great time catching up with everyone. It had been about 18 months since Eric has seen most of our family!

T and Dad taking a break from playing in the snow. We haven't seen snow like this since we were kids. We all had a great time.

Grandma threw together some sugar cookies and we had a great time helping cut and decorate.

Tayeson had a great time frosting his cookies. He seems to prefer the clupming, mounding method.

Dad also got in on the action.

It is really important that you apply the proper amount of sprinkles. You must also make sure that you don't underdo it.

And here is the finished product. Notice the clumping, mounding method I mentioned earlier.

And my personal favorite. I'm pretty sure this is made of several bottles of sprinkles.

We also got to help Grandma put up and decorate her Christmas tree. I think he was a little confused about where the sock should go.

Tayeson and his cousin, Michael, taking full advantage of the unattended decorations.

T helping Uncle Travis with the bulb distribution problem.

Before we left for Twin Falls we opened our Christmas presents from Uncle Travis and Aunt Courtney. As you can tell, Tayeson was thrilled with his Knex. Thanks for everything guys.