After returning from the Tri-cities, family just kept trickling into my parents house. The kids had it great. They were the only grand kids around for until a couple days before Christmas so all they had a bunch of aunts and uncles plus grandparents to themselves.
Okay, so where to start with this long break (in total I was in the US for 6 weeks).
Food. Yummy! I think everyone loved the food. We had homemade egg rolls, lasagna, jambalya, smoothies (Michelle is professional you know), crepes, plus tons of junk food (we were definitely never short on the junk food). For meals, the grand kids got to sit at a little plastic picnic table and for the most part did really well eating together.
We played some basketball down at the church while the kids ran wild in the hallways. After a couple rounds of bump (or knock-out or whatever you want to call it). We had a couple different match-ups as the score board shoes. We did random teams, oldies vs. youngns (young won), then siblings vs. in-laws (siblings got their trash kicked...we married well).
Games, games, games. It all started with California speed which Michelle introduced to us. It's a two player game and goes pretty quick. We were playing so much we decided to add a little bit of competition to the mix. We all kept track of the number of games we played and how many of those we won. The person with the best percentage at the end of they day (you had to have played at least 10 games and couldn't turn down a challenge) won $5 to be spent on junk food. I won the first night and got some cinnamon chip bread for Great Harvest (oohhhh that sounds so good right now). Mom also setup two tournaments, one for ping pong (she finally got an indoor/outdoor ping pong table) and one for California speed. In the California speed tournament it came down to me and Ryan. Playing best out of 3, we each won one, then Ryan beat me in the final game by one card!
One night all the girls went out for ice cream and had a mini baby shower for Dana. We decided we should leave the kids and have girls night more often (sad Lani and Tricia couldn't be there).
We headed over to Robinswood and played to play on the playground and feed the duck. Kherington and Kevin were the only kids and we had 7 adults to play with them. Not a bad ratio :).
I tried to have fun craft for the kids to do each day. They decorated gingerbread houses (we hot glued the graham crackers together the night before to make one house for each kid). It was fun to watch each kid decorate. Eli wanted only chocolate, Ez just piled on a bunch of candy but didn't want to use the icing to glue it, Shaun did an amazing job all by himself, Reese stayed at the table for the longest and let me help, aside from squeezing the icing onto the house. Fun times :). We also painted, made candy cane reindeers, played Christmas bingo (complete with little prizes), made a star ornament, used stickers to create a nativity and of course decorated cookie for Santa.
We did another banana run. The banana run is a 5K run marked with banana's. It started after Logan and Anna's wedding when all we had to mark the course was banana's. The kids welcomed us to the finished line with chimes.
Christmas Eve we had our traditional Lasagna dinner with a nut hidden. The person who got the nut gets to open the first present. The winner this year was Elise (well, truth be told, Bren stuck an almond in her piece of lasagna after no one spoke up about finding the nut). We had Fred's parents and our neighbors the Unzelmen's join for the evening. After dinner we did the traditional nativity re-enactment. This year Kevin was baby Jesus and Kherington was the angel.
Christmas morning we had to wake the kids up around 7am. As you may have guessed from the picture below, Kherington was still pretty tired, but after opening some presents she woke right up. She changed her clothes at least 3 times as she opened up presents with something new to wear.
After opening present we had a delicious breakfast of pigs in a blanket (Reese is helping roll them below), eggs, and sticky buns. Then headed to church.
A friend came and took family pictures for us. They were the quickest family pictures we have ever taken and they turned out pretty good...now we just need to photoshop Lani/Scott's family in.
Ryan and I took the kids down to celebration lane in downtown Bellevue twice. We had gone to the Cheesecake Factory for our anniversary and happened to be there when it happened and decided we needed to take the kids. Both kids loved it. Kevin just bobbed his body around and used the noise maker as the teether. Kherington loved dancing with the costumed people (especially the penguin). Anytime we're in Bellevue for Christmas/New Years, we'll definitely be sure to go.
Okay. So that was a couple of the main events. The pictures below should give you an idea of how much fun we ha being together. Some of the things we enjoyed were: bubble baths for the kids, trampoline jumping, decorating the Christmas tree, naps, marshmallow guns, eating, games, talking, feed the homeless, celebration Tricia's birthday, movies outing (big thanks to Anna's sister for ticket for all of us). It was so much fun to be home for the holiday and to have almost everyone there (very sad Lani/Scott and fam couldn't make it).
