Christmas!

We had Christmas Eve at our house this year!  It is SO MUCH WORK to host 15 people for Christmas dinner.  It all works out and is lovely in the end, but boy, it is a lot more relaxing to go to someone else's house!

Jack LOVED the Guatemalan hot chocolate.

The food.

The only decent picture of the boys.

Jack and Uncle Chris were dressed alike.   Jack must have noticed because he pushed all the gifts to Uncle Chris.

Jack opening a really really big truck from Grandma and Grandpa.

Katie and Greg posing with their gifts from us.   Greg was using a wooden racket!   He needed this upgrade!

And Christmas morning at my Uncle Doug and Aunt Karen's house...the gift pile.

 

Cooking with his new pots and pans!

If you remember, a while back I posted about Jack singing into a candlestick.  Now he has a microphone!

 And, one of his favorite gifts, the Thomas umbrella. 

Christmas in Indiana

Right before Christmas, we had our annual celebration in Indiana with Pappy (my dad) and my mom's family.  Here are some pictures of Jack and his pappy and his new chair.

Opening gifts with the girls.

He got a doctor's kit, that had a pair of plastic scissors in it, and he insisted on using the scissors to open the rest of the gifts.

With Great Grandpa.

Christmas Cookies

Jack helped make Christmas cookies this year!  He really enjoyed it! 

Decorating them was hard, all he wanted to do was eat them!   These are all naturally dyed decorations, we don't do any artificial food dyes here.

 We took them to our Christmas celebration in Indiana, and everyone loved them :)

Santa!

We went to Somerset again this year for Santa pictures.   It went better than last year, but not great....Jack was excited about it, until Mommy put him on Santa's lap and walked away.

You can see in the first one, he's ok, as as they progress, he gets more upset....

You get coins after you see Santa, and then you can redeem them at various locations in the mall.

This was his favorite buy.

And we came home, got a Christmas tree and decorated!  Jack was happy to help!

Big News/old Ice Festival photos

So, part of the reason I haven't been blogging lately was that I was super busy being mom, running a store, and working to become a La Leche League leader!  And, today, I am an accredited La Leche League leader!  After the difficulties I had nursing Jack, this means so much to me.  I love my LLL group, and I don't know what I would do without them.  I wish I had known about it when were having our problems in the beginning, but at least we found them when we did!   And now I get to help other nursing moms with their struggles.   I'm very excited!

Back to our regularly scheduled catch up post....the Ferndale Ice Festival. 

Here is our ice sculpture, in front of the store. We had a live carving done...this is how it started out.

Jack with the finished product.

John and Bryant took Jack and Marcel around downtown to see Santa and the live reindeer!

The sign on their lap says "Santa will return at 2:00."  So, they sat in Santa's chair instead of on his lap.

Later that evening, we walked down the street to see the tree lighting!

Noel Night

It's February and I am still posting stuff from December.  I WILL CATCH UP! 

We went to Noel Night in Downtown Detroit this year and it was a lot of fun!  We plan to go every year.   It's huge and so we just went to the Detroit Public Library area, and just hung out there.  We saw some exotic animals in the library and then found the dancing there too!  Jack boogied all night! 

We then went outside to walk back to the car, and found hundreds of people singing O Holy Night, it was beautiful! 

Christmas

Christmas was great!!  Jack was so much fun!  A lot more fun than last year!  

Christmas Eve we spent with John's family at Bryant and Rachel's for dinner and presents.

Then on to midnight mass, and then to Uncle Doug and Aunt Karen's house!  When we arrived at 2:30 am, we saw that Santa had already come!

We had matching PJs this year!

Look at all the gifts!!

 

We got a bunch of great knitted things from Sue.... This was the best picture I could get in this awesome hat...

 

The next day we went to Indiana to celebrate with my dad, and my mom's family.

 

 

And now we have a house full of toys we don't know what to do with!