Some of my favorite pictures my mom took - no particular order

Some random pictures from my parent's house

Hangin' with the cousins (and Paul and Karrie too of course)

Oh my gosh.....I don't think a little boy could possibly have more fun - hampsters, helicopters and Rock Band! Heaven!

Christmas Day - New London

We cut down our Christmas Day a bit this year and didn't make it over to Ben's extended family in the late afternoon. The kids played hard at Ben and Nancy's and after that we decided to go back to Green Bay to get settled in so they wouldn't fall asleep in the car at 6pm or later on the way to Green Bay and then not sleep that night.
It's so much fun having all the little(r) kids among the Nieto's now! Alex and Brendan love to play together and Kyra, Maya and Annalea just find eachother interesting now but next year they will have a LOT of fun!

Christmas morning

We had to wake the kids up for the second year in a row! We would actually prefer to get up early on Christmas Day because we leave Rhinelander mid-morning to get to Ben's family in New London by lunch time and we like to have some time for the kids (and us!) to play with their goodies before we pack up.
Maya was less than thrilled at first to be woken up....but she warmed up the present idea pretty fast.

Party!

My attempt for some nice Christmas pics of the kids

Oh well!

Sledding

Grandma Ruth's house - Christmas Eve

A few days before Christmas Eve we headed north to Rhinelander. We had a good visit w/ Grandma and Grandpa Bergeon and a visit with Zoe and Lori before Christmas Eve..then of course we got to see everyone! Ben came and joined us on the afternoon of the 23rd. He also had an adventurous drive across the UP. US 2 was not kind to us before Christmas this year.
Alex made a sled run down the front hill at Grandma's. He was really into it this year! Christmas Eve morning some neighbor boys came over to sled too with their Grandma and they played so hard for over an hour. We were a little concerned that Alex would be too tired to hold it together through the party in the evening but we ended up very pleasantly surprised!
Maya started officially walking on about the 23rd. She had been walking more and more at my parent's house but once we got to Rhinelander she really wasn't crawling much at all.
I'll split the pictures up a bit over the next couple posts.

No pictures but nerdy fun......

The first saturday night I was in Green Bay (after a terrible drive over across the UP by the way!), Matt and Amy and I went to the Weidner center to see the Mythbusters. If you've not seen this show, check out some of their youtube videos (my favorite is the rowing waterskiing of course), it's good nerdy fun.
Anyway, 3 of the cast members were doing a Q & A session and it was only $5. So we got to see Tory, Kari and Grant live. It was fun to hear their behind the scenes stories about some of the episodes.

The next Saturday we headed down to Madison early in the morning to go to the Whad'ya Know?
holiday "office party". If you aren't familiar, Whad'ya Know? is a show on NPR on saturday mornings. More good nerdy fun. The office party included karaoke and spiked egg nog. Or should I say spiked brandy? That's what it tasted like anyway...especially since it was before lunch! It was lots of fun, I was disappointed that I didn't get picked to do the quiz at all but oh well!

The Village

No, not the movie by that guy who made the Sixth Sense and not the old state hospital grounds........the Dept. 56 village that my mom collects. My mom, my brother and a nice man who lives down the street from them combined their pieces to make a really special display for Alex this year.
My mom has most of the village buildings and a few of the harbor pieces belong to my brother and then their neighbor who has just an enormous collection of buildings, layout and TRAINS let them borrow a couple of his pieces and a real working model train.
Alex loved it! It made up a little for missing the Festival of Trains here this year.

Must catch up.......before we left Dec 13th...the snow

In case you didn't know....we have gotten record amounts of snow in the month of December like many parts of the US this year. I took these pictures a couple days before the kids and I headed to WI on Dec 13th.
While we were gone, before Ben joined us, we got almost 2 more feet on top of this! I didn't get to see that all on the ground because before we came back it rained for 2 days straight one weekend. We still had snow when we got home but much, much less.
We got another 10 inches or so since we returned so there is plenty to play in. I wonder what January will bring??

15 months by the way

On a side note Maya was 15 mos old last week and since I never took her in for a 12 mos well check I thought we might as well do one now.

She is 29 3/4 inches tall and weighs a whopping 19 lbs 6 oz!  Talk about a difference between the kids - Alex was over 20 lbs by the time he was 6 mos old!

But she is healthy and well proportioned so all is good.

She can walk - we have witnessed her taking 5-6 steps at a time - but she chooses not to.  Crawling is faster.

Today she discovered that she loves mittens.  Loves to have them put on.  And then takes them off.  And then wants them back on.  And then takes them off.  And then wants....I think you see where this is going.