Caught up (mostly/almost)!

moving on to part 3 of the "catching up" series !

My niece's baby turned 1 at the end of November, so we went to her birthday party.  Her & my grandkids had a good time - as well as the dog! 

I call this photo "chaos summed up in one shot".

Then we took the grands to see Santa at my VFW.   

Both of them willingly went to sit on his lap.  

This guy was in someone's yard a couple streets over from us.  

He's not one of the 12 footers, altho I have seen them in various places. 

LittleMan's favorite thing to do at stores is to pose with the mannequins. 

Meijer's isn't as fun as Target, tho. 

Maddie and her hooman watching videos. 

These little antler clippies were quite the find!  They are sparkly & clip onto the hair really solidly. 

My SAR team walked in the annual light parade in Lapeer again.  

People sure love to see the K9s! 

Our director manages to always get horrible pics of me! 

This is actually Team Naughty & Team Grumpy.

I found out in early December that I had 60 hours (7.5 days) of vacation time at work that I needed to use or lose!  So I took a couple full days & a LOT of half days off the last 2 weeks of the year.

We spent Christmas Eve at my niece's house and we had a good time, decorating cookies & playing games & visiting.  We also had a white elephant gift exchange.   I was sad to find out that we weren't allowed to do gag gifts!  I would have put much more effort into a gag gift.

They're so cute!

BabyGirl got presented-out about halfway thru and was ready to just stop and color.  LittleMan was all into it, tho.

This is the White Christmas that we had!  

We started going to Frankenmuth on Christmas the year my dad passed away.  At first we stayed at the Bavarian Inn and went to the water park, but now we just go to Zehnder's for their chicken dinner.  I was so happy that my body decided to get its sense of taste back that day!  We had cinnamon rolls for breakfast & couldn't taste or smell much then.  But I ordered the portobella ravioli for dinner and that first bite was a literal flavor explosion in my mouth!  

The Spouse left for Arkansas the Wednesday after Christmas.  He'll be working mobile from his mom's house until the beginning of February.   So that means I spent New Year's Eve with the Spawn.  We went on YouTube and found last year's ball drop in NYC and played that for the grandkids before they went to bed, so they could have their own celebration.  They had no idea what was going on. 

We'd gone to the store earlier that day and she found a bottle of gingerbread wine so that's what we used to toast with. 

As of January 2, we have a 4 year old in the house!  

Since he got a literal truckload of toys at Christmas, I'm going to plan on gifting him "experiences".  There's a place called the Reptarium not far from us so I'll take him to go see the critters that you can touch.  In mid-February, they'll also have an aquarium built across the street, so we'll have to go there sometime, too!  

So that's pretty much it for now.   

I haven't put it out there to the universe yet, I do plan on blogging more.  

And do the A to Z Challenge again in April.  

But let's see how that really turns out! 

This is a house that's nearby - a modern day Clark Griswold!  

Except with LEDs so they don't burn anything down. 

They're on a corner lot, so this is only like half of their yard!