Belated Holiday post...

I hope everyone had a great Holiday season!!

We had a nice Christmas. This year we had my Cousin Amber and her family (husband Grant and two year old Anna) staying with us. They live in Klamath Falls, and Amber was due to have a baby sometime during the holidays and needed to deliver at OHSU, so they stayed with us for about two weeks. It was nice having them here. I'm sure it was probably hard for them to be away from home for Christmas, but I think they had a pretty good time.

We tried to do a little bit of sight-seeing with Amber & Grant during their stay, but the weather was pretty bad to do too much outdoors. We went to the Oregon Zoo one day. It was cold, but it wasn't raining that day. There were hardly any people there, so we practically had the Zoo to ourselves. I think the kids had a good time. We also went down to Saturday Market in Portland one weekend. That's always a good place to people watch!! Chico wanted to take Anna to ride the Carousel at Jantzen Beach, so we did that one day and took a drive through the different areas of Portland.

Christmas day:
I didn't do a very good job of getting many photos this year at Christmas, but I did get a couple good ones and thought I'd share...

We got our normal GIANT Christmas tree. I think this one was about 12 feet tall this year (a little smaller than last year). I had Jaxon stand in front of it Christmas morning to show how big it was. I also got a cute one of the boys together in front of the tree in their jammies...



Here are some photos of the boys opening their gifts...

This was one of the gifts that Jaxon got from Santa. I love the expression on Mateo's face! Jaxon's really into his Geotrax Trains, so he got some additional pieces. He really does a good job of building tracks without help from anyone.
Here's Mateo with his gift from Santa. He was very excited!! He's been asking for a DS for quite some time. He got the Star Wars Lego game to go with it!!
I didn't get a photo of Amber's family, but I got a quick one of Anna opening one of her gifts while sitting with Amber.
New Year's Eve:
We all managed to stay awake to see the ball drop this New Year's (minus the kids). I probably only stayed awake because we had company. We got to hear the usual gunshots and fireworks in the neighborhood as the clock struck midnight.

As for Amber's baby... Amber went in to OHSU early in the morning on January 2nd to be induced. After laboring almost all day, Joshua John Knoll was born at 11:52 pm!! He weighed in at 8 lbs, 13 oz and was 21 inches long (a big boy and he was a week early)!! Joshua is scheduled to have a heart surgery tomorrow (1/8/07). My mom and I got to meet Joshua on Sunday and he looked just beautiful. He was asleep while we were there, but even asleep I could see that he resembles his big sister Anna. I can't wait to see him again. Our thoughts are with Amber and Grant while they await Joshua's surgery and speedy recovery.