Christmas: Take 4

And Happy New Year's Eve!

Thankfully, we made it back home sans baby. I am finally feeling better, so must have been some sort of bug.

We are excited to celebrate with Auntie Jen for a couple days before she heads back to NH to spend time with Dan and Evan.

The weather was way too yucky to try to make it out for First Night, and even though the girls insisted they were going to stay up until midnight, I knew they were going to need to get to bed. So we opened a few awesome presents from Auntie Jen:

BabySlimJim crashed super early from not taking his nap today and cuddled with MiniM.E:

And we played some Minute to Win it Games and ate appetizers!

The girls asked to go to bed at 9:30. At least Netflix has some good count downs!

Happy New Years! (A bit early because I can't make it to midnight either!)

Christmas: Take 3

We arrived in CT with some time to spare before picking up Auntie Jen (her plane hadn't even taken off yet) so we explored the airport for a while. The girls were so excited to see her!

We stopped at Ruby Tuesday for lunch before heading to the hotel.

Auntie Jen's boyfriend arrived with his son and then there was a lot of swimming before we met Aunt Donna, Uncle Mark and my cousin and his family for dinner at the hotel lobby.

Sadly, I was up all night Saturday night thinking maybe it was time to have the baby (it wasn't) but it left me feeling really sick Sunday morning, so I skipped out on the morning swimming session and barely made it to breakfast.

MiniM.E. found this crazy contraption there

Everyone seemed to have a great time once we got to our biggest family gathering yet (22 of us this year)! I was sad to miss a lot of it because I had to lie down...

At least I felt well enough to come down for caroling:

Present opening, and of course, the family photos!

Back to NY tomorrow, hopefully still as a family of five!

Christmas: Take 2

Yesterday we drove to NH to start phase two of Christmas. We'll hang out here today and tomorrow, open some presents and eat our "real" Christmas dinner of prime rib, and then drive to CT on Saturday to pick up Auntie Jen at the airport and celebrate the "Roth Family Christmas".

The most exciting part of our visit so far has been Gram and Grumpy's new kittens. One of them, Mitsu, only has three legs and is very timid, so we don't see much of her, but the other kitten, Pru, loves to play and has really taken a liking to BabySlimJim.

We have just been enjoying being here, playing with kitties, swimming in the hot tub, and of course, opening some presents.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas started early this morning for us, as it does for any family with young kids (right?). It was still dark out when the kids came down to open their stockings and presents from Santa.

The girls have been excited for Christmas for months and even BabySlimJim picked up on the excitement (sort of).

It was all we could do to hold them off from opening their presents from us until after breakfast.

And then we spent the day playing with the new toys and getting Christmas dinner ready.

After dinner we smashed a peppermint pig. A Saratoga tradition we might have to add to our Christmas every year. No one really wanted to eat the pieces for good luck, but it was really fun to smash it with the tiny hammer!

Merry Christmas!!