3 January 2010

The day after Christmas, we loaded up the car and headed east to Bloomfield, New Jersey to be with Joanne's brother Jerry and his wife Danae for the blessing of their baby Eden on December 27th. Here's what Eden thinks of getting her picture taken:

Jessica loves to hold babies.
This is Eden's big sister, Calista. She got a Frosty the snowman for Christmas. She likes to sing along with him: Fwah-see a snowman, what a jolly he was cold. With a corn pipe pipe and a button nose and a toy made out of coal.

About two hours from home, I realized I had remembered my church shoes, but had left my suit and dress shirt draped over a chair at the bottom of the stairs. I've been in the market for a new suit anyway, so we stopped in Allentown, PA and got this one. Without it, I would have looked pretty poor for our family photo op following church on Sunday.

Grandma Fails got to spend time with all nine of her grandkids, though Trevor didn't get to be in this particular photo.

On the Monday following Christmas, we went into New York City for the day. It was super crowded, but aside from that, we had fun. We also got to spend a few hours with our friends Jenni and Ed who live in D.C. now, but used to live in NYC and were in the city for the holiday. This is a shot of us in front of a giant (and a little too realistic for Madeline's tastes) dinosaur inside the Toys-R-Us in Times Square.

Here are the girls right after they died and went to heaven in Toys-R-Us. They each had $35 from Grammie for Christmas, and we let them go hog wild.

Here's us in Times Square with the New Year's Eve ball drop area behind us. The ball wasn't up yet. Yes, Madeline's wearing my Smashing Pumpkins hat, in case you were wondering.

Joanne in Central Park with her brother Jerry and sister Jennifer.
It didn't snow while we were in the city, but there was some snow left over from a previous storm, and a little snowball fight broke out.
Here we are in front of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. We had some food there and then headed out of the city around 4 pm. Traffic was nasty getting out of the city, but we had fun and were glad to be headed back to Jerry's house.

The next day, we played it pretty low-key and went swimming at Karl's hotel before they checked out to head home to Delaware.

We stayed the night and drove home uneventfully on Wednesday. We spent New Year's Eve at the Relief Society president's house with a few other couples from the ward. Jessica was the baby sitter -- it was her maiden voyage as a baby sitter for an extended period of time, and she did great.

Our 2010 start off great, and we hope it will be a prosperous and peaceful year for us, and for each of you.