Colorado Christmas

 Merry Christmas!!

Everyone had a great time today.  James loved his Legos ("I'm hugging the box!") and his Angry Birds underwear, and Mattie was happy to get art supplies and a new LSU t-shirt.  (And at Aunt Kimberly's, she accidentally mixed up the name tags -- she meant to give a possum stuffed animal to James and a US map puzzle to Matthew, but it turned out that James was excited about the puzzled and Matthew loved the possum, so it was all for the best!)

Kimberly and Paul cooked a delicious Christmas lunch, and all the kids got to play together.  (And the adults had fun with a game of Balderdash!)

Christmas Eve

 Jess made a Mexican feast for our Christmas Eve festivities. 

James loved seeing Grandpa drink the "magic water" that made the toothpick come back out of his stomach.  :)

From Sun to Snow

 The boys are having it all this Christmas -- swimming in Grandma and Grandpa's pool one day, and sledding with the Colorado cousins the next!

Cold Water Boys

 I guess I should have packed the boys' swimsuits after all!  (Fortunately, Grandma was prepared with a suit for Mattie, and we had swimsuit-type shorts for Jamesie.) The chilly water did not deter them.

(By the way, the red mark on the side of Mattie's nose is marker, not an injury.)

Florida Xmas

 
 We arrived in Florida late last night, and the boys had a wonderful time today with their grandparents and Sue.  James did four or five puzzles one right on top of the next!  (Which is a rather challenging way of doing puzzles, since the pattern of the previous one sometimes makes it hard to see/match the current one.)

Their game of throwing things in the pool and then fishing them out with the net of course ended with them being soaked -- fortunately it was a pretty warm day here, even if the water is cold. 

New Hats

 We went to Target the other day because James needed gloves or mittens.  Of course, when we got to the winter-wear display, he immediately spotted the Angry Birds hat and wanted it (and Mattie spotted one with an orange stripe and wanted that one).  I figured that they might be more excited about wearing hat that they'd picked out, which turned out to be right.  (James ended up with the matching Angry Birds mittens as well.)

James has been wearing his Angry Birds hat everywhere, and I must say, it looks great on him.  We went out to eat, and as we were walking into the restaurant, he wondered if the people would think he was an Angry Bird.  (So, when we were being seated, we asked for a table for two grown-ups, one kid, and an Angry Bird.)

Santa Train

The boys had a great time at the Santa Train. Matthew especially liked finding Rudolph!

James picked the first seat on the train, and when we sat down, he struck up a conversation with the driver.  "Hey, Santa." (The driver was wearing a Santa hat.  We met Santa and Mrs. Claus later on at the North Pole.) "We have some reindeer food!"  "I really like all the lights."  It was so cute!

The reindeer food (oatmeal and salt mixed in a little baggie) was one of the little projects they had to entertain the kids while they were waiting for the train.  Matthew was quite concerned that this would not be enough food for all the reindeer (and he was not convinced by us telling him that lots of kids would be giving the reindeer food, so this only needed to be a small snack for them), so on the way home he was insisting that we make more reindeer food.