Here are the rest of our holiday photos. This is in reverse order. If you are a blogger, you understand the process of putting your pics in and how they can easily end up in reverse order of what you would like but stay with me and you will get the gist of our holidays.
We went to the Fenton Jubil'Eve New Years celebration. It is a family friendly, no alcohol event that takes place throughout downtown Fenton. Fortunately, Keith's cousin Nicole lives downtown not too far from Kurt and Erika (they spent NYE in Las Vegas, lucky). So we began our night at Kris and Nicole's house to watch the fireworks. They have two children; Kristian is the same age as Lauren and Morgan just turned one. They also had some friends over with their two kids; Keegan who is 3 and Payton who is almost 2.
At the end of the night, we took Lauren to look at the spotlights. To her, this was way more exciting than the fireworks!
Part of the Jubil'Eve festivities took place at St. John's Catholic Church. They had a bluegrass type of blues band upstairs with some crazy woman that I am pretty sure would have danced even if the music wasn't playing. Downstairs, they had four large inflatables. The kids were really a little bit young for them compared with the average kid there but we still managed to have fun.
Payton (Lauren is on the left) in the moon bounce.
Keith holding Morgan.
A blurry picture of Keegan, Kristian and Lauren's head in the moon bounce.
Morgan, Kris and Keith watching the kids in the moon bounce.
Lauren in the moon bounce.
The slide. This was overwhelmingly huge for Lauren. That is Payton sliding down on the left and her brother at the bottom of the right slide.
It not only took one helper to get Lauren to the top, it took the second helper, as well.
She was unwilling to do any climbing on her own. The "steps" were a little too spread out for the the little ones.
When she finally got to the top, she froze up. Just look at her face; you can see the fear.
The helper had to climb up and try to coax her down. I think Lauren was trying to climb back over to the "safe" side but the girl pulled a Christmas Story ho, ho, ho on her and kind of pushed her, gently down the slide. When she got to the bottom, she seemed like she enjoyed it but there was no way I was going to put her or the helpers back through that.
Lauren, Keith and Lilly with the Fenton Jubil'Eve snowman.
Prior to going to the church, the kids enjoyed Kristian and Morgan's toys, a little too much. Lauren did not want to leave. You would think she didn't have a single toy to her name!
Kristian, Payton and Lauren
Payton, Kristian and Nicole
Kristian and Nicole
Lauren
Poor Payton. I didn't really catch her at her normally good moment.
Morgan with Lilly.
Lauren, Lilly and Keegan with Krisitan watching the fireworks out the window.
Lauren and Kristian watching fireworks. Lilly really didn't care about them.
Monday, we became one of the thousands of people in Michigan to lose power. We are almost always lucky, in that we hardly ever lose power when everyone else does. I did my neighborhood duty and called Consumers' to report the outage. (I think my neighbors all know that I am going to report it so they don't.) C.E. said that we wouldn't get our power back until Wednesday at 6 p.m. Everyone I told said, "But it is Monday." They all seemed awestruck that we would be without power for 2 1/2 days.
Here the girls are enjoying the lantern-light and jumping on the chair. Huggy sisters.
More jumping.
Lilly and her snowman hat that Grammy made.
We drove down to Terry and Lynn's house to borrow a generator for the outage. During the time we were gone, our basement flooded despite Keith bailing out tens of gallons from the sump pump before we left. Luckily, the power was restored by the time we got home. I guess they said Wednesday so that when they turned it on quicker we would think they have God-like powers.
While at Grandpa and Grandma's I took some pictures of their new additions. Here is the upstairs family room. Actually, I should say the third floor family room because there are family rooms on all floors! This is the girls' corner. There are some toys, an antique chalkboard, chairs just their size and other items that aren't in this picture.
Grandpa's huge tree. I had to stand on the landing to get a full picture of it. This was actually on Christmas day.
Cooper opening his present with Grandpa.
Cooper checking out the gifts.
Keith and Lauren.
Grandpa and Grandma's beautiful new dining room. It is huge!
Christmas morning at our home. Lauren found their new doll house.
Lilly was way too little for any of the inflatables at the church so she found her own fun by walking all over the gym.
