Holidays - birthday - blizzard

Christmas came and went with lots of joyful screams (you could gauge Caitlyn’s excitement over a gift by the pitch of her screech), fun with “Baby Frankie” (including a game of dress-up that girls both loved), and mild weather (the kids even hot-tubbed on Christmas Eve!).

We wrapped up the holidays by spending New Year’s Eve with the Musselmans at HersheyPark (where Nathan and his buddy Elijah were literally inseparable) and then toasting 2016 at 10 p.m.-ish. The kiddos stay awake later every year! (Which is more than I can say for me….) 

Then came Caitlyn’s birthday month! Our Peanut Girl celebrated turning seven with a snowflake-themed slumber party with friends (complete with snowperson cookies, snowflake lights and decorations, hot cocoa, party games, movies and manicures) and a hibachi dinner out with the family (note: eating whipped cream-covered pineapple with chopsticks requires skills we have yet to acquire; we wore some of the birthday dessert).

Oh, and that mild weather we had in late December? We paid for it with a record-breaking snowfall (about 30”!) the weekend after Caitlyn’s birthday. Notice the collage is a clockwise progression of pictures: Friday evening, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, and – on the bottom – Sunday morning. As Caitlyn demonstrates in final photo, the only way to sled was off of a neighbor’s deck. Elsewhere, the snow was too deep to walk through!