The Day after Christmas - Getting Ready for Church

The day after Christmas was Sunday. As the kids were getting dressed for church, they looked so cute in matching clothes that several photos were taken. First it was Dallin and Lucas. Then Madoc was added with all three boys in matching clothes. The the girls were then added. When photographing the children, I came to the following conclusions:

1. The longer they sit and them more photos are taken, the harder it is to get them to appear happy.

2. As the number of children in the photo increase, it becomes nearly impossible to get the "perfect" photo where they all look happy, and are looking at the camera and their hands are where we want them (not covering their faces). I believe there is an equation that has 1/number of children factorial in it.

We got a couple of pretty good photos with just two, but as children were added, the "perfect" photo was getting harder to get. As I was looking at the entire sequence of photos, I realized that I loved the entire sequence and laughed as I went through them all. So I decided to post the entire sequence so you can also laugh at the "out takes" like at the end of a movie.

I love these kids!!!!!!!!!

Christmas Morning

On Christmas morning, we all got up early (still dark outside) to open presents. There were 20 of us gathered together.

There were some children (young and old) pretty excited about presents.
We had our traditional omelets for breakfast and an amazingly good ham dinner later in the day, but I did not get any photos of food related activities.

One Day Before Christmas

On Friday, December 24, a few of us went to hike up to and climb at Castle Rock State Park. Bret quickly climbed to the top of the first pile of rocks we came to.

Not too far away, we found Castle Rock. From one view, a profile of the rock looked like a face with a large nose. Neil was putting his finger in one of the "nostrils".
There were lots of small and large caves in Castle Rock.
After we got back from Castle Rock, it was time to go to Brian and Annie Blank's house for an amazing selection of foods and a very enjoyable evening of socializing and Christmas music.
Sheri Played the piano to accompany the Christmas songs. We also had most of us playing chimes along with some of the songs. John and Mark were teaching Dallin how to play the chimes.
Neil was a one man band with the chimes.
It was a great evening with about 40 people in attendance.

Two Days Before Christmas

On Thursday, December 23^rd we went to Natural Bridges State Beach in Santa Cruz. In the morning, Neil and Bret were brushing up on their Foosball skills.

We went to the beach in the afternoon. Low tide occurred just after dark and we wanted to see the tide pools as close to low tide as we could get. The tide was going out as we arrived. We had a good time getting close to the waves and then running away.


When we got to the tide pools, we saw starfish, sea anemones, crabs and hermit crabs. If you look closely at this photo of a starfish, you can see the reflection of two grandchildren in the water.
There were several hermit crabs that were fun to catch.
There were 13 starfish on this one rock







It was a fun day at the beach.

Two Days after Christmas

I have a quite a few photos to post from Christmas. I'll start with the pictures I took on Monday, December 27 on my cell phone (we forgot to take the camera with us that day).

We first went to the Children's Discovery Musuem. There were some really fun things for kids to do with water toys. Since kids love to fluch things down toilets, they had the whirlpool equivalent for kids to send balls down the drain.
The grandkids had a good time playing with the many creative toys.

Paddling in the woven boat with Uncle John.

After visiting the Children's Discovery Museum, we ate at Panera (St. Louis Bread Co).

After lunch, we went to Big Basin State Park, and hiked through the large coast redwood forest. This is in front of the Father of the Forest. It is a pretty fat tree.

John and Dallin are visiting the Mother of the Forest. This tree is the tallest tree in Big Basin at 329 feet tall.We came across several banana slugs on our hike. It was getting late, so there was not much light for this photo. It is pretty obvious why these are called banana slugs. This guy was about 7 or 8 inches long. The Banana Slugs are the mascot for nearby UC Santa Cruz. I wonder if UC Santa Cruz has a track team?? How fast can they be?

It was a fun day. We ended it with pizza from Via Mia.

I'll post other photos when I return to San Jose.