Christmas and Beyond

Behind in my blog, so I thought I would update with some fun pictures. Let me start by saying that I LOVE my Grandma to pieces. However, she goes through stages where she wears the same shirt/sweater over and over again. It just so happened when we arrived in SC for Christmas, she and I were dressed the same--lots of laughs for this.

We arrived in SC Christmas Eve and it snowed on Christmas Day so we enjoyed playing out in the snow. I taught my niece how to throw snowballs ( I don't know if that was the best thing to do, but it was fun.) She wanted to bring the snowballs inside and throw them at Uncle Mike.
I even got the chance to babysit my niece and nephew for an hour or so. We played, ate and took a nap--thanks to Mimi for helping.
Came back to Florida just in time for New Year's Eve. Shortly after arriving back in Florida my uncle called me with the news that he was in Pinellas county. He was in town driving for Penn State who was in the Outback Bowl. Mike and I meet up with him at his hotel. He has a fun job driving buses (or I should say motor coach) for different NFL and MLB teams, churches, schools, etc. I was so excited that he was in town. I couldn't see him much due to his busy driving schedule, but glad it worked out for us to see each other.
We celebrated Christmas with Mike's family on New Year's Day. Our other new nephew enjoyed his first Christmas and he had just figured out he could get on his hands and knees, but couldn't crawl. He was loving being on Cooper's level. He couldn't crawl, but he would roll quite quickly to get to where Cooper was hanging out.
After we opened our Christmas gifts and ate, we started playing our annual traditional Rob Your Neighbor game. We bring white elephant gifts or things you don't want any more or dollar store gifts. So some gifts can be great and others can be not so great. We place all the gifts in the middle of the table and play BINGO. If you win a BINGO game, you get to pick a gift. After all the gifts are gone, we set a time limit and this time if you win BINGO you can steal a gift from someone. After the time is up, we go around and open all the gifts. . .the one rule is, if you can wear it you have to try it on. BIG LAUGHS!!! I did really well playing Rob Your Neighbor--I got lots of things for my classroom--pencils, erasers, candy, goodie bags with toys. Now just saving up items for next year's game of Rob Your Neighbor. This is the only time when playing BINGO that you don't want to win. :-) Fun times during the holidays!!