How does you handle holiday family juggling?

Time in CT usually means time with the cousins (or at least two of them)!

There aren’t any cousins on my side but there are 9 all together on Patrick’s side.  My in laws welcomed 9 grandkids over just 5 years! 

Besides hanging out with cousins, we took advantage of the wide selection of hockey equipment found in New England over B-more, visited Kringle and Yankee Candle factories, and ate lots of food.  Can you say monkey bread?

It should also be noted here that we’re thankful for the wonderful guy who got PJ all geared up for hockey.  He was even able to find a helmet to fit his head…even if we did have to pay twice as much. 

Note to shoulder pad manufacturers:  Please make the head opening a little bigger or provide snap openings or something.

Oh, we also took in a CT Whale game.  It’s the most attuned the kids have every been.  The Whale even won!  See Ty’s victory violin? 

He’s been taking his air violin everywhere these days

This year, the kids had the chance to shop and wrap completely independently of me thanks to this awesome homeschool Christmas bazaar in which we participated.  It was so fun to see what they picked out for everyone. 

To: Ty, From: PJ

To: Mia, From: Ty

To: Dad, From: PJ

To: Pops, From : Mia

To: Nana, From: PJ

Uncle has a special place in the kids hearts since he lived with us for a year.  It’s always great to have him home, especially around the holidays.

Each of the kids received hydration packs from Nana and Pops for our future geocaching adventures.

This year we had a full house for the annual Grinch reading.  It’s always a picture-worthy occasion.

Our resident drama queen has taken to acting it out as Pops reads.

To view in full-screen mode,

1. Start the slide show by clicking on it.
2. Click on the icon on the bottom right with the four arrows.
3. Pause to read at your leisure.
4. Press ESC to return to normal view.

warm days this fall,

it would almost be a sin

not to do some

leaf jumping.

Did you jump this fall?

I was asking our friend who is a local meteorologist if there were any other weather events we could experience this year that could take down trees.  So far we’ve had blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and snow in October.  Even though we only got about an inch, it was so damaging because the trees still had leaves leaving (pun intended) a lot of surface area for accumulation that the trees normally don’t have to endure.

But sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and pay for the pictures, post them on the blog, relegate them to the basement and move on.

I was NOT our family who had an off-hand conversation about getting a dog, decided we wanted one, found one, and adopted one into our home all in the span of 24 hours.  We would NEVER be that impulsive.

This is NOT the newest member of our family.

Meet Hope.

A vineyard not too far from us has an annual grape stomp festival. We’ve been wanting to go for a couple years now and our schedule and the weather finally cooperated this year.

Ironically, Ty opted out of the stomping competition because it was too messy.

They put in a valiant effort but didn’t quite manage to come out on top.

Later on, I got my stomp on with two of my friends and we earned ourselves a free glass of wine for our superior grape stomping efforts. I think someone took pictures so I’ll post them if I can get my hands on them.