Holidays catchup

Things have been pretty busy for us with the usual holiday rush, building the new house and working on the new practice. To catch up on what we've been doing I'll post lots of pix w/ few words...

How often does Santa show up in a hot balloon in your back yard?


We met with some friends from dental school.


We played in the snow a lot at my parent's house.



We didn't go snowboarding this year, so we turned the deck into our very own kicker!




We tried out our snow gear by throwing snow at each other...





Utah can be very beautiful in the winter.


We tried to take pix of all the grandkids, but none of them turned out quite right.


The boys enjoyed opening their presents.





Risa really does get to scrap a little.


Trey made fake brains and showed us what he would look like if he really did take his brains out and lay them on his stomach.


Flag football is over and the Maple Valley Mo-Mo's didn't make the playoffs.


We were lucky enough to hook up with some friends over the Christmas break. This is Nate/Collette and Chris, high school friends of Carson's.


Sorry Nate, that's the best pic I have of you.


We had our annual gift exchange with some friends in Maple Valley...


...and we were the lucky ones that got the dancing Christmas Gi-gi doll!


Putting up decorations and having a baby are not always a great combination, but he is so darn cute it is hard to resist.


Proof that he is a Calderwood boy.


We just had our fifth snow fall of the winter, with the second one that stayed around long enough for the boys to do some sledding again. Days like this though are great as well to play outside.


Our boys are starting to become the three musketeers.



Why are little boys so cool with mowhawks?

Christmas Letter

Here are the pix from our family Christmas letter. Not perfect, but the best we could come up with trying to get three crazy boys and two non-photogenic adults all to look good at the same time.




On a side note, we were very tempted to get guitar hero for the family for Christmas this year, but passed on it in the end. Tonight I became even more tempted to get it after seeing the following video. Caeden was unhappy and likes watching videos on youtube. I will just click on the random 5 that pop up as "now playing" on the main page. This one kept both of us entertained for a couple of minutes...amazing!




Near the 1:40 mark this person must be Eddie Van Halen or something.

Christmas Party

Here is my creation sitting on my desk at work. Unfortunately spouses are not invited to the Christmas party where I currently work so no pictures of my better half. We did glass blowing and it was a fun activity.






We will post the Christmas pictures of our family soon as well. Things have been crazy trying to get our house ready to list on the market in January.

Work

This isn't an excuse, just an explanation........

Outtakes

The other day we tried to take family pictures for our Christmas letter. I set up a "home studio" in the kitchen (okay, just some brown drapes and the camera on a tripod) because we thought we could get better results if we could take 100 pictures instead of just a few at a real photo studio. You will see in our Christmas letter that even the best ones aren't perfect, but here are some of the more funny and less perfect ones:

Oops!

Today we made gingerbread cookies after Trey got home from school. He got out the cookie cutters, and while looking through the boxes he said I hadn't organized them very well because the dinosaurs were in the "land animals" box, the pterosaur was in the "flying animals" box, and the plesiosaur was in the "water animals" box. He put all the prehistoric animals together, and included the alligator for good measure because "actually, the ancestors of alligators lived in the dinosaur age, and they're one of the oldest surviving reptile families." The poor kid has pretty much no chance of escaping his childhood without becoming a science geek: Carson and I grew up with 4 non-science geek parents and still managed to become geekish biology majors; with 2 science geeks as parents, Trey as the oldest is getting the worst of it.