Tis the Season - Part 2!

Well, the holidays are over, and the feeling is bittersweet. While I am disappointed that this time spent with family that I cherish so dearly is over, it is nice to return to some type of normalcy again, too. We had an absolutely wonderful Christmas season. When I left off in my last post, Eric and Grant were in the process of making Christmas cookies together, and, despite Grant's lack of attention to the task at hand (he was too anxious to eat the cookies, rather than work on decorating them), they turned out great, and they were delicious!

We had a number of other parties over the past week. On Christmas Day we went to the Buteyn Christmas party (Eric's mom's side). It was great catching up with many of Eric's aunts, uncles, and cousins, and also fun playing the annual "anything goes" volleyball game. Aunt Lori even hauled out her ancient video camera to try and catch some of the action. Had to plug the thing into the wall!! Too funny.

Christmas night was spent at my grandma's condo with my mom's side of the family. As always, my grandma goes above and beyond the (great) grandmotherly call of duty with the giving of gifts. She just loves Christmas and seeing her great grandkids open presents (and she does a darn good job of picking out great gifts!). Christmas night is our annual huge BINGO night as well. It's such a blast, and grandma, again, outdoes herself with the huge variety of prizes (all scored at great bargains according to her - she starts shopping for next year's party the day after Christmas - he! he! We ended up with a nice Columbia fleece, some bath towels, men's button down shirt, a fleece blanket, children's book, some Target gift cards, and more!).

The night after Christmas was spent at my parent's house celebrating Christmas with them and Kathi, Chad, and Brielle. Had a difficult time getting a good family pic in front of the tree, as seen below, but we had a wonderful and relaxing evening.

We gave my dad money towards the purchase of some new sunglasses and wrapped it up with these beauties from the '80's that my mom still had in her "dress up" box.

Our little girl loves walking around with her dolls and bottle!

Sunday noon was spent with my dad's side of the family at my grandparents' house. We don't get the opportunity to see my aunt, uncles, and cousins on this side very often, so it was great catching up with them again! In addition to a gift exchange, we play BINGO at this party, too, but with a little different twist. All gifts are wrapped in newspaper so nobody knows who brought what gift. It's pretty intense, because there are generally pretty good amounts of money in some of them and there are also some prank gifts, too.

Grant opening up his highly desired Thomas wooden roundhouse from great grandpa and grandma to add to his train set.
Grandma opening up her Hope sweatshirt. She and Grandpa go to all the Hope b-ball games. Still die hards even after both of her granddaughters have been "retired" from Hope sports for over 6 years now (they came to just about every one of our home games).

We went to the Holland Aquatic Center on Monday with Chad and Kathi and had a riot! Because of the holidays, the hours were altered a bit, so instead of going to the preschool swim time there was open "splash zone" for all. Grant loved going down the little slide and playing with the basketball hoop, and Brooke just adored being in the water, giggling as she walked around.

We loved it, too, though, because we tapped our youth and decided to do some of the open water activities. Below is some video of us running across the giant roller. I feel like I was in a scene of the TV show Wipeout. It was so much fun!