Happy New Year!

We traveled to Kennewick to be with my family for New Year's Eve. Here are some of us at midnight... Woo Hoo!

The kids had fun with glow sticks and watched movies while the adults played board games. We ate lots and lots of good food and enjoyed our own Martinelli's sparkling cider, right from the bottle.

My kids were thrilled to have a little snow to play in. My dad had them playing a game of fox and geese. It's a game I grew up playing. Anytime it snowed, my dad would make a path and all the neighbor kids would come to join in on the fun. We'd play for what seemed like hours.

There's one fox and everyone else are geese. You have to stay on the path, but run from the fox. If you get tagged, you become a fox and help to get the rest of the geese. The last one is the fox for the next game.

It's more fun when the snow is a little deeper but the kids didn't seem to mind and had a blast.

Jared helped the kids to make 3 giant snowmen. I think they used all the snow in the backyard. The boys were thrilled when he told them they could chop one down.

Since we weren't together for Christmas, we had our family gift exchange on New Year's Day.

I gave Anthony this cool shirt. I love that he has no idea Chris is behind him.

Anthony wrapped up 3,000 pennies for Chris... awesome!

My parents loved the testimony book we all put together for them.

Instead of decorating a gingerbread house this year, my mom found gingerbread trains. The kids (and Jared) got pretty creative.

Here's a closer look.

Yes, our train had double mounted machine guns. I'm still not sure why.


My kids love their cousins, as you can see....

It's always a lot of fun to get together with our families. We missed Doug and Des, but it was fun to see all of the rest of my family.

Happy New Year!