Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas everyone! I sure hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. This year we decided to make the trek back to Utah to be with my family and had a wonderful time. But since Petey is getting bigger, we wanted to have 'Christmas morning' at our house before we left - we wanted to start some new family traditions and we also didn't want to haul all of Petey's gifts with us. You'll see why in a moment...

For a couple of months now Petey has been obsessed with Thomas the Train et al. I had no idea how far this obsession would go after innocently checking out a Thomas video from the library, but it has now blossomed into a full-on love affair. He loves the books, toys, movies - anything he can get his paws onto. Since he didn't have any actual trains, Trav and I thought of getting him a train set for Christmas but I began to have an anxiety attack after seeing how expensive the dang things are. Enter my beloved sister-in-law Michelle who told me at Thanksgiving that they had an extra train set a neighbor had given them that her kids no longer play with that she'd give to us (for FREE!). SCORE!! She gave us this huge set with 20 trains and a bucket full of tracks too. So for Christmas, we set up the tracks and when Petey came out he basically just stood there for a few minutes saying "choo-choo?" then sat down to play until we had to drag him away. He loves it - a couple of times he's even insisted on sleeping with his trains...And this is only about half the track...

We also joined the ranks of parents who spend all night setting up their kids toys when we decided to get Petey a bike (or 'bykacycle' as he calls it). This he liked a lot (although notice the train in his hand still) - we just need to help him figure out how to peddle and steer at the same time now.

Then we left for Utah and really enjoyed our time out there. As some of you know, every year growing up my dad set up traps for us to go through in order to get to the Christmas tree. Well, he's started doing them again for the grandkids and I think the kids really enjoyed it this year. Here's Petey and his cousin Brookie making their way through the balloon tunnel.
And since we are now desert dwellers, we figured Petey should get a chance to enjoy snow while we were still in Utah. I think he enjoyed playing outside but mostly he liked being drug along on the sled and eating snow. Silly kid (but still dang cute!).