After Christmas

The day after Christmas, Neil, Ashley and their kids arrived. We took 173 photos on our camera while they were there, but I narrowed it down to 30 of the photos to show here.
There were of course presents to open.

The little princess was delighted to have new clothes. The little prince was more excited about the really cool egg separator he found in the kitchen. With his inherent creativity, he figured out several ways to launch a ball across the room with the egg separator.

Another fun activity was riding in the car in the basement. It is hard to beat argyle socks and a fly swatter for cruising in style.
We had a good snowstorm for a white Christmas. Joseph decided to add a smiley face to our door. The kids wanted to go out and play in the snow. The sledding was pretty good.Rocky wanted to play too.

At the end of the day Neil helped the kids make a snowman. He was then moved to the deck floor. He tipped over but stayed frozen for quite a while. The next snowstorm burried him, but when the snow melted, the snowman was still there, but a little diminished. He finally melted completely on Sunday, January 17.We went to the Magic House. While there, we climbed on Jack’s magic beanstalk…
Shopped at the grocery store…
Went fishing for magnetic fish...
Made ice cream cones…
Played with water…
Played with sand…
Crawled through tunnels…
And used dirt moving equipment.
After all of that work, we were hungry.
On another day, we hung around the City Museum.
And crawled through lots of tunnels.
On the last day, we went bowling.
The ramp was very helpful for small bowlers.
There was rejoicing at some well placed balls and some disappointment when the ball went the wrong way.
Overall, we had a good time.There was still enough snow to make a snowman as a car ornament when we came out to the parking lot. The snowman did not survive falling off the car less than a block from the bowling alley.

Christmas

I’m still a few weeks behind on blog updates, but I am trying to catch up. The days before Christmas and Christmas day were pretty quiet. With traveling to Arizona for Thanksgiving and California for the wedding, we decided to make the Christmas tree easy and we put up the artificial tree. I put up the tree before the wedding, but we did not get the lights and ornaments on until Sarah and Joseph got home a week before Christmas. Here are Sarah and Mom in front of the tree.
This is my new ornament that has Gayla Peevey singing “I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” from her 1953 recording.
Sarah flew to Pennsylvania on December 24th, so we had the traditional omelets that morning before Sarah left. I did not have any photos of Omelets, but they looked like our traditional omelets.

On Christmas morning it was just Joseph and Mom and me.
Our stockings were not used to all of the space around them. They are used to being crowded together.
Joseph got creative on the name tags. It was pretty obvious who the presents were for.
We had lots of wonderful presents and we appreciate all of the gifts we received.

After presents we had Belgian waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. These were the last of the strawberries from the garden. This is me making waffles.
They were really good. Here is Mom with her waffle.
Yes, she still likes whipped cream.
The next blog entry will have photos of the after Christmas festivities while Neil, Ashley and the kids were here.