Happy New Year

On New Year's Day we headed over to Paul's brother Mark's house for dinner. His cousin Dede from Boston was in town visiting her sister Sue (and Bob) from St. Paul. It was great to see DeDe again after staying with her last summer and enjoying the Red Sox game and a fish dinner that was out of this world. (Dede is in the front on the right next to Grandpa Roger).Another cousin came up from Mankato/Butterfield - Casey Lloyd and his wife Diann.
Casey's mom, Ruth, was Roger's sister (Paul's dad). He does play-by-play for the Mankato State basketball team on the radio.
I wish I had been able to get all the cousins in one picture together like we did at Thanksgiving at the Catlins. It's nearly impossible to get everyone's schedules to match, and here we did it just on the spur of the moment.
Jonathon (Casey and Diann's son) was here from California where he works for a television news channel. The younger generation was conspicuously absent from this event - I think they were all still sleeping in after greeting the new year!! And, of course, Christie and Alison had long ago flew the coop back to New York.
Drew and Anna (where are you, Anna?) came down from their rooms for the food and to say hi to the visiting elders. Anna taught me how to play with her online pets. Virtual pets are really very easy to take care of!
Drew has his knapsack handy to store extra treats in case of a food shortage. He is shooting up like a weed! We ended singing around the piano - the last gasp of Christmas carols - but it was great fun no matter how awful we might sound!

Hurrah - Pictures from Christmas Part II

You can see why I was disappointed with my camera phone pictures! But, something is better than nothing. Jane and Chuck's tree was beautiful in real life. I'm going to use some camera phone pictures and some that Jane sent me. Can you tell the difference?

I had the same problem taking pictures that Jane did - I tended to focus on the little boys when grabbing for the camera. They started out a little bit shy, but soon warmed up to each other.

Maddox is showing his muscles here. What a guy!
The stairs to the second floor were a very popular play spot!

The boys are all ready for bed in their cute jammies.

Matthew shared his new teddy bear with Maddox. Pat got a real deal at Cub when they were "undecorating" just before Christmas. I think you can see that family gatherings are going to be lots of fun the next few years - and you, too, can experience the joy through the wonder of blogs!

Christmas at Home

Christmas at our house was great. We came home after the Christmas Eve service at Waterbrooke for a Swedish meatball dinner and then opened presents.

Our presents seemed to have a regional flavor to them this year. The New Yorkites brought cool Adirondack gifts, and we gave Minnesota style mementos. Note the vintage North Stars hat!

On Christmas morning, the kids headed off to Vadnais Heights to spend the day with their mom and grandparents. Paul recently test drove one of these little cars and I wouldn't be surprised if someday we have one!

It was a wonderful time, and we're so glad the girls have each other near by way out there in New York. Of course, we love visiting there, too, so retirement is looking better and better!

Christmas Celebrations Part II

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? I forgot to bring my camera to Jane and Chuck's on Christmas Day!!! I remembered that my new cell phone has a camera, so I took a bunch of cute pics of the little boys, but they really turned out fuzzy. I downloaded them into Verizon's Pix Place, and have had a dilly of a time trying to send them to my computer - every time I go online I get an error page - just temporary, of course. Well, we had a great time on Christmas Day - though we missed Jenna and Andy who were in Pittsburg, and Tom and Kim, Griffin and Katie who live in Illinois. Yummy food, and a fun gift exchange that Heidi and Jane planned. If you want to see some good pictures, go to the link to Jane's blog. I hope she'll share some of her pictures with me for this year!