Yeah, I know it's January 3 and that I'm a few days late, but thought I'd tell everyone Happy New Year anyway! We had a great Christmas! We spent time here in our place until Christmas day... made Christmas cookies Christmas Eve and opened presents Christmas morning and so enjoyed family time with just the 3 of us. Around noon, we left to go to WV to spend a few days with my family. (I might add here that when we looked for a place to eat on the way, we only found a Starbucks open.. I was grateful, even though they are terribly over-priced!) That evening, we feasted on a great dinner prepared by my mom, sister, and dad and then opened more presents! Stone, of course, loved reuniting with his cousin Nate and they spent the next few days together unseperable!
Friday afternoon, my mom's brother and his family came to visit, as we have a yearly Christmas gathering with them. We feasted again and opened even more presents! Nate and Stone were joined by my cousin's daughter Hailey who is 41/2 and the three of them had a ball together. We're so blessed that Stone and his cousins love being around each other!
We came back the Sunday after Christmas and regrouped so Kevin could go to work on Monday. I tried to muster enough energy to clean the house, do laundry, grocery shop and run other errands to prepare for spending time with Kevin's side of the family. What a blast that turned out to be! Kevin's grandmother (his dad's mom) flew in from Shreveport, LA along with her sister (who lives near Houston, TX) to spend time with some of the Hallquists and to celebrate her 80th birthday, which was December 31. So, we had K's grandmother, her sister, K's parents, K's sister (Gini) and her family, K's uncle Rob and Aunt Martha and their 2 kids+ spouses+ kids and one dog!! What a full house!! It was good to see K's grandmother and her sister, whom we last saw July 2007 when they came to Greenville to visit us there. It was also good to catch up with K's cousins, spouses and little cute babes as well. One of the kids is 8 months, the other is 6 months like little Wyatt. (Will have to post more of those family pics when I get them from K's cousin who had the fancy camera and took all the good pics!)
For part of the week, we had Gini, Jason, Mercy, Wyatt and K's parents staying in our 2 bedroom apartment! It was like one grand slumber party! Ha! Stone and Mercy thought it was GREAT fun to be sleeping in the same house as each other and loved waking everyone up WAY before anyone was ready to get up in the mornings. This morning, before Gini and family left, we opened our gifts to/from each other, so Christmas has lasted for quite a while around here. It has been wonderful to have family around, but I must say, I'm pretty exhausted right now and I need to get my head in gear to go back to teaching preschoolers on Monday morning. I think we'll have lots of play time that day!!
Here are a few pics to highlight the past few days.... oh, and a sweet Christmas gift to us all was finding out that K's youngest sister will be expecting around the end of August 2009! Congrats to Meri and Geoff once more and we look forward to adding another sweet baby to our crazy familiy mix!!
He was pretty happy!
I have to say, this one was really cool!
with space to add Meredith's little one next year.
we had to get out of this house!
Mercy was Ariel, the Mighty Knight.. ha ha ha!
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