Home for the holidays

"Oh there's no place like home for the holidays..." I guess for same people, this could mean a bad thing. But for us, it's a good thing! We headed north to the Cincinnati area to spend Christmas with my family. When I tell people we went north to the midwest for the holidays, most quickly assume we had a white Christmas. Unfortunately, we had no snow. I hate the cold though so I was content having the weather be fairly mild for late December. Snow would have been fun though for Olivia to see. Oh well. We'll have to wait for a future Christmas for that to happen.

She looks so grown up to me in this picture

Christmas morning is a bit chaotic with my family. Having 11 people taking turns opening gifts one by one youngest to oldest can take hours! As expected, Olivia was more interested in climbing on all the gifts than actually opening them.

She got a little bored with all the present-opening and decided to see if she could kick the tree with her feet.

My parents had this singing reindeer that Olivia was obsessed with. When you pushed the button on its paw, its mouth started moving and he started singing "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer". Olivia couldn't get enough of it. Needless to say, all the rest of us were ready to tape the reindeer's mouth shut after hearing the song over and over again.

It wouldn't be a post about visiting my family without pictures of some of my siblings - we have so much fun together! We played lots and lots of games over the few days we were all there. We had various tournaments with each other playings games such as as ping pong, Wii bowling, Wii tennis, dominoes, Uno, Yahtzee, picturing coloring (who says teens, 20s and 30s year olds can't color with crayons anymore?) and another one I can't remember. The winners of the respective tournaments got prizes at the end. Amazingly, every person won exactly one tournament. There were no duel winners and no individual that wasn't an overall winner.

I'm not exactly sure what's going on here but this nicely
summarizes my family: crazy, weird, unusual but mostly funny.

Before we headed to my parents, we celebrated Christmas with the three of us in Houston. Several of the gifts we were giving each other were too big or heavy to travel with, so we had our own little Christmas together. We gave Olivia her own little chair with her name on it and she loves it! She especially loves using it as a climbing tool to climb onto something even higher or to reach things that are typically out of her reach. Ha....that's my girl!