2013: A New Year

The Pascuals came down with Maddie, Daniel and Ryan (Wride cousins) for the week of New Year's. We spent many additional nights at the Wride's house so that cousins could capitalize on playtime and we could play games when the little ones went to bed. Here we are playing Ticket to Ride, which Jorge Luis dominated.

I wanted to take a picture of the girls on the Sunday before New Year's, but the boys wanted in on the action too. Result: cute cousin photo. Just missing John who was likely wrestling one of Adam's Sunbeams in the other corner of the classroom. 

Emma and Maddie were twinners. 

John, Spencer, Daniel, and Ryan are sure handsome in their church clothes too.

These cousins have the BEST time together. They are very creative in their play, although there is a good amount of Wii and computer/iPad games in the mix too. This year a favorite iPad pastime seems to be Minecraft. 

Here, the cousins are making up their own version of RISK.

On New Year's Eve Day, we needed to get a little energy out and found the church gym to be the right place for the job. It's important to have a change of scenery every now and again. We pulled out lots of basketballs and bouncy balls and after the kids had played basketball for a long while, we turned it into a game of dodgeball (pictured below). It's really fun that these cousins are old enough to play structured games. After dodge ball, they ran the lines on the court playing a game of Fox with Gma. 

All this fun can be exhausting! John was a champ. He didn't get all the naps he is accustomed to, but he was still a cheery fellow through all the celebrations. Here he is catching a cat nap at Grammy's house.

We had our traditional fondue dinner and dessert at the Wride's house. Yum!

The cousins donned some festive hats to welcome in the New Year. This photo was taken just before John went to bed...at a very reasonable hour. Emma made it until about 11pm, and all the other kiddos rang in the New Year with sparkling cider and grapes. (I had to take a little 11pm cat nap to make it to midnight. Ah, pregnancy.)

New Year's Day we had the classic white elephant gift exchange. The foam fruitcake is still in circulation. Other "winners" this year was the Afterglow Country CD and a slice of Jarlsberg cheese that had been left out overnight. It's always humorous to see what this crowd comes up with. Since Aaron was not in attendance, no toilet paper rolled in the mud was in circulation this year.

Here are darling Emma and Trina in dress-up.

Playing games with the fam on New Year's Day.

A few days later, Laura, Adam, and Valerie met up with cousin Tyler in Baltimore, where he was having a job interview. We sure love having all this family close by!