Christmas Continues!

It may be a new month and a new year, but Christmas isn't over yet!

On New Year's Day we had extended family Christmas at Catherine and Ron's house:

We all stuffed our faces with appetizers and finger food, and then the kiddos opened a ton of gifts from their aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

Adult Gifts?

Kelly called for everyone's attention and said she needed all the grown-ups to come to the living room so we could do adult gifts.

It turned out that Kelly and Catherine had gone on a little shopping spree in the last week of December and picked up an assortment of fun little gifts so that we Big Kids in the bunch would all have something to open like the Little Kids did :)

So we all found our seats, and then Catherine randomly drew a name out of a basket.

It was... Kevin. So he got his pick of any gift on the floor!

But it wasn't White Elephant rules, and so everyone would just keep whatever gift they chose.

So Kevin was happily surprised when his randomly chosen gift turned out to be a stuffed snowman with a baker's hat on!

The game continued through several others, with each gift-opener proceeding to pick the next person from the "name basket".

But here are a bunch of pictures of everyone having fun :)

Eventually it was my turn, and I got a lovely little candle!

Kevin had an opportunity to get an amazing picture of Riley and Hannah:

...He just had to coax a smile out of them:

Say "BOOGIES!":

Oh, and here's Kevin's new snowman, having joined the ranks of his army of groundhogs and Super Mario enemies:

You'll notice that Goomba especially does not look pleased at this newcomer's presence, but he should tread carefully. If the snowman is also from the Super Mario universe, then it may well be one of the ones from MarioKart that explode if you drive into them.

So, should Goomba choose to provoke Snowman into exploding, while there's a Bob-Omb and a Minecraft creeper in the immediate vicinit, there just might be a mushroom cloud over all of Morrisville.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Regular readers are well familiar with our neighbor Ruth by now. She is the gift that keeps on giving, and January has been no exception!

Here's a video of her doing the common "Ruth task" of bringing in the trash:

That was Friday the 2nd.

Here she is again on Saturday the 3rd, using her indoor voice:

Losing Our Marbles

Saturday evening we headed back over to Catherine and Ron's for dinner.

Kevin wanted to get there a little bit early to build something for the girls with the marble factory we gave them for Christmas.

So, here's the best thing he could come up with in 15 minutes or less, having no idea going in what pieces (or how many of each) were available to him:

Not bad, Uncle Kev!

The girls approved:

...At least, they did until Liv got that "I fink I'm all done wiff dis game" face, because "Hannah is doing it wrong!"

Aaaaand then they moved on.

But Grandma and Uncle Kev still wanted to play marbles!

Candy Flipping

The girls moved on to convincing Riley to play Candy Land with them.

I just love Hannah's pose here in this second picture! She looks like she just finished reading Sun Tzu's The Art of War and is desperately trying to apply it to Candy Land:

After Liv and Riley got positively spanked at Candy Land, they realized that they too need to read The Art of War:

Meanwhile Hannah reveled in her victory by performing sick judo moves for Uncle Kev and then immediately demanding to watch the videos of them on his phone:

For dinner, we ordered from Taormina's. And then Kelly brought homemade strawberry shortcake cupcakes for dessert :)

Model Citizen

On Sunday the 4th, Ruth performed one of her obligatory modeling sessions in the dingy stairwell.

(Where else would one do such a thing?)

Kevin and I watched the series finale of Stranger Things that evening. I thought it was fine, but Kevin was underwhelmed.

And here's more Ruth, this time barely managing to park, in a basically empty lot:

Then when she finally did park and came inside, she was dressed like she just got home from a South Park convention that she attended dressed as Kenny:

Kevin worked with Joe that day, and Paula ended up treating them and me and Riley to dinner at the Metro Diner in Langhorne.

When we got home we found a letter on our door (and Ruth's) from the landlord, instructing us to remove our cameras from the stairwell (in response to our complaint back in December that Ruth had mounted hers on her door so it was pointing directly at our door):

We were pretty steamed at the baseless threats, the lack of clear rules regarding use of cameras one way or the other, and the general level of douchebaggery in the letter.

But we weren't about to sit down and deal with it at that hour.

Kevin said he would pen a response later in the week, and instead we started watching the British/Viking historical drama The Last Kingdom the rest of the evening.

Steakout!

Paula and Joe had given Riley a very generous gift card for Christmas, which she could choose to spend at a pretty extensive list of places.

They assumed she would probably want to use it at Ulta Beauty and stock up on makeup since she's going through her makeup phase. But it turns out that she's already pretty well stocked.

So...

On Wednesday the 7th while Kevin and I were eating leftovers for dinner, Riley walked past us in the living room, popped out the front door momentarily, and then returned with dinner of her own.

Kevin and I could not stop laughing!

And finally on Thursday the 8th, Riley's birth-dad Bradley asked if he could stop by to drop off some Christmas presents.

He had to bike over since he doesn't drive, but he stayed for probably the better part of an hour... and gave Riley a bunch of makeup that was not on the list she provided him when he asked what she wanted.

Then with nothing in mind for dinner after Bradley left, Kevin and Riley and I just decided to order cheese steaks from Bambino's.