Christmas Eve

I can't believe how slow I have been with posting pictures from our long Christmas weekend. Truth be told, I am most speedy about posting when I am excited about the pictures... and I am feeling like I really dropped the ball with pictures this year over Christmas. I was taking pictures all weekend, but yet, when I got home and reviewed them I couldn't believe what I had missed!

We started out our weekend on the Wednesday before Christmas when we made the trek up to Hibbing. We had planned to leave on Thursday but bumped it up a day because of the snow storm that was inevitably coming our way. We still got stuck with some lousy driving conditions, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it would have been had we waited. After a quick stop in the metro to meet Mitchell's mom (as he was headed to WI with her for the weekend). We all said our goodbye's to Mitchell, and we were on our way. The trip up with the littles ones was OKAY, not so great, no so bad. We were on the road for well over 4 hours and arrived in Hibbing about 11:15pm, but yet Joel did not miss a beat or even consider a nap during the entire drive... REALLY!?!. I have a feeling the DVD player we got for Christmas will come in handy next trip.

We spent the next few days hunkered down at my parents house (besides a side trip to church and Grandma and Grandpa Kokotovich's on Christmas) with my parents, my sister, my brother and his girlfriend of 3 years, Jenn. It was the first time in a LONG time that I had spent more than a half a day or so, really, with everyone and I really enjoyed the quality time with my brother, sister and Jenn. As far as Joel and Grant... they certainly had no complaints about the endless 24-7 love and attention they were getting. There are definite perks to being the first children among my family members... :)

Here are few pics from Christmas Eve, which was at my parents house... like I said, beware the lack of good pictures, as I really didn't get the pictures I would have liked.

I made several attempts for this picture of the boys with the great grandparents and this is about as good as it got:) That is probably why I never even made another attempt to get one with Grandma Rose and George...

My two lovely grandmothers

Grandma Rose and Georgie

Aunt Connie and her kiddos, Jim and Elizabeth

My funny sister, cracking everyone up doing a Grandpa Mike impression, walking with his cane, while wearing his jacket and hat :)

Christmas Eve dinner. Jeff and I stuck with the 2 monkeys at the small table ... (rightfully so since they are our children and all :) Plus, I wouldn't want to give anyone else the job of making sure spaghetti and meatballs didn't get thrown across the living room onto the white carpet...

Stair-jumping into daddy's arms. Fun stuff.