A few glimpses of Christmas

We had a smooth drive to Michigan on the way up (1.5 hr nap was all, though, in 9 hrs of driving) and a decent broken-up drive back (though in six hours, our son did not sleep at all, kept demanding different toys to play with, and cried when I tried to close my eyes for five minutes. Annoying!)

The visit with his age-mate cousins was fun, if intense. There were some problems sharing on our boy's part -- toys, chairs, what have you. But mostly it was a riot to see the two 2006 babies together and to hear how much Lucy sounds like Elliott when she gets upset! And it was super fun to see Georgia go from taking only a few steps to clearing entire rooms! And it is always crazy to see how fast the newly-teen cousins are growing into adults.

It was madness as usual up at my folks' house. Elliott loved his time with Thomas the train and his cousin's Thomas toys (some old, some new). It's fun to know he's generally just fine without us around. But John and I did have a hilariously fun time playing ping-pong with Elliott in the room, sometimes trying to hit with his own paddle, sometimes crawling on the table and just digging it that the balls were zooming by his fluffy hair. It was probably the hardest I've laughed in our family of three.

The weather was all over the map. We had a day of sledding in new snow, rain that froze over to create a slick icy hill, more cold, then fog and more rain along with record high temps of almost 60 that melted all of the snow at my folks' house followed by windy cold.