Happy New Year

We have fairly new traditions each year that we have been cultivating since we moved to beautiful Wisconsin. One of those is our New Year’s Eve celebration family style with our very good friends The Balistreri’s and Emanuele’s. We have for the last three years joined their families to ring in the New Year with all of our children who are around the same age. While the children laugh and entertain themselves we get to have a little adult conversation and catch up on what has been going on in each other’s lives along with a meal prepared by Melissa, who is a phenomenal cook, though she would say otherwise. What a better way to ring in the New Year than with the people you enjoy?

Some sledding

We tried to go sledding after having had a little bit of snow. The hills we go to were a little hard though. One hill had good powdery snow, but it had been worn away where you sled. The other hill was good but our sleds were leaking air which made it hard to get good speed. We had fun anyways, which is the whole point.

A few of our Christmas memories this year

Christmas foosball.

Looking at the gifts the kids made in class.

Playing Kerplunk.

Echo trying to help build Lego sets

The presents under the tree and the kids patiently waiting to open them.

A firefighter and mercenary. Watch out for the rubber bands they can hurt.

Resting and enjoying one of my presents.

The crazy hat family photo.

Jack building his Halo Mega blocks set and Alex and Mark working on Monster Fighters Lego set in the background.

Echo the Christmas dog. She was s o well behaved the entire time.

The majority of the Christmas memories were made on Christmas Eve when everyone was around. On Christmas day Andy had to go to work so he couldn’t spend that much time with us. We did have Christmas morning together with just Andy, me, and the kids before it was all spoiled by work.

Hope everyone else had a Merry Christmas and is looking forward to a great New Year!

End of the World? Not quite…

Although it sometimes feels like it could be the end of the world when you are dragged away from all the fun that freshly fallen snow has to offer to the drudgery of something like school.

After not getting anywhere near the drop of snow that we were told to expect it was kind of nice that at least there was enough for the kids to find some fun.

jack had just enough time to make a shallow snow angel on the driveway while waiting for the bus to come pick them up to go to school.

Because the wind had blown really hard there was plenty of fallen branches to occupy their time while waiting.

At some point the fun is bound to end and real life begins.

At least it was only a half day.

Alex’s Holiday (Christmas) Party

Is it wrong for me to find it highly amusing that even though it is called a holiday party, everything that you do is included in Christmas? Anyway, I was able to volunteer at the school for Alex’s kindergarten party. He loves it when I am there. I think in Kindergarten it is a point of pride when your parent shows up in your class room. It was also pajama day so it was not really like a school day at all.

We played all kinds of fun games. they got to decorate cookies.

Eat the cookies they decorated.

Be wrapped up in toilet paper.

Become a snowman with a scarf and buttons.

And they even had food and drinks.

Plus, the day ended an hour early due to the anticipation of inclement weather. There is no better to put you in a good mood more so than a kindergartener celebrating a holiday.

The first Snow of the season!

Oh how the children have been waiting for this day to come. Every day they check and ask and even listen to the weather to see if it will snow. It finally did and they were out of the house for most of the putting their tiny child prints in the snow and building the first snow man of the season.

Of course, sadly the next day was a bit warmer and after that it rained so there wasn’t much left of the snow man besides a pile of hardened snow.

Guess that’s what pictures are for. Oh and then there’s the crazy dog  who completely loses her mind in the snow and runs around in circles at top speed for hours for no reason. The dog that hates the water loves the snow.

St. Nick’s Day

So this is definitely a Wisconsin thing because until I met Andy I had no idea that this day even existed , much less what occurs. Seems as though on December 5th St. Nicholas visits all the children's homes and fills their stockings so when they wake on the 6th if they have been good they get gift and candy or if they have been naughty they get coal. This apparently is a different person than Santa Clause who I always assumed was St. Nick and is separate from the stocking stuffers given out at Christmas time. Actually I am super unclear of what the whole back story is, but suffice it to say the children’s stockings were miraculously filled with a few goodies indicating they had been more nice than naughty this year. this is also a good indicator for their Christmas time as it serves as a reminder that somebody is watching you to make sure you are indeed behaving nicely.

Alex was super excited to get the gold Batman… because he’s made of gold!

Jack had me wait to take his picture until he was able to line everything up so that it could all be seen. Stocking stuffers Assemble!