Aruba, Jamaica, oooo I Wanna Take ya

Merry Christmas to us! Thanks to Grandma and Grandpa, the ten of us enjoyed an early Christmas present and took a family cruise. We headed south to Florida, jumped on a boat, and then just kept going; we went so far south we almost hit Venezuela! We stopped at three islands, Aruba, Curasao, and Princess Kays.

It was a week of non-stop fun - having three awesome cousins to play with was THE BEST! We played mini golf, ping pong, shuffle board, basketball, ate, swam, went to the water slides, snorkeled, dug giant holes in the sand, ate, rode water bikes, fed ostriches, ate, and ate.

My dad won the ship's basketball tournament and my mom won the ship's longest drive golf challenge. And me, I ate a lot of ice cream. 

I practiced a lot of ping pong during the week and what I learned is the ball is very tiny and hard to hit. For a while I used two paddles and just spun around like a tornado. After smashing into the table and hitting myself in the head with a paddle, I decided that wasn't my smartest idea. Maybe if the table were just a little bit shorter.... 

The ostrich farm was awesome. We got to feed them, stand on an egg (did you know the egg won't break even with 300 pounds on top of it - geez!, and get close to a crocodile. We even celebrated my birthday again (and again, and again!)

There is no way to sum up all of the fun we had but my Uncle Rick put this awesome video together with highlights from the trip, check it out: http://vimeo.com/54267549 - Thanks Grandma and Grandpa for the awesome Christmas present and the endless memories!

The Beginning of Three

Three has begun, or at least the celebration of me turning three. Having a birthday on November 30th means the party begins early and doesn't stop until December 1st. Both of my parents have birthdays near Christmas (Jan 4 and 16th), so they are highly sensitive to having your birthday smashed with Christmas. They are very kind in this area and make sure I get a "Happy Birthday" party and not a "Happy Thanksbirthday" party.

For this reason, we had my official birthday party yesterday, even though by actual birth date isn't for another two weeks. So you may see another post with birthday pictures near the real thing, but for now, here are some from the celebration. Oh, and as you might have been able to guess, it was a car party....

 

 We painted cars

 We raced cars

 The winner won a Piston Cup

 We ate "spare tires"

 We threw balls into the tire

 And we had a car parade 

So far, three is looking pretty good!

Happy Halloween!

The Halloween festivities began with our family hosting the church Halloween party on Friday night. We had a lot of fun and people's costumes were awesome! Some worth noting included my buddy Hazel dressed as a fairy with toothbrushes sew to her dress...the Tooth Fairy! and the Zobrists came as chefs and put their one year old son in a giant stove pot dressed as a lobster - hilarious! And a couple that is expecting a baby came as a 70's guy and she was a disco ball, with the ball on her belly. So clever. I, as you can see, was a football player. The "clever" part of my costume was my parents - they dressed as NFL replacement referees.

Then Hurricane Sandy hit the area and we were very lucky. We lost power for three days, but our house wasn't impacted and all of us were safe. The tricky part was not having power for Halloween. So we lit our yard with our car headlights and lots of jack-o-lanterns and wa-la - trick-or-treaters appeared! We had just over 300 kids this year, (less than our usual 450-500 trick-or-treaters, but respectable for a house without power).

The Keenans hooked us up with a new addition to our yard - this skeleton, and he has a light up head. The best part about his head, it's battery operated, so it worked without electricity! Very cool. I figured out Halloween this year. Knock on a door, say, "Trick-or-treat," get a candy, say, "thank you," and repeat. I am definitely a fan of this holiday...and repeat.