Family Christmas in Brandon

Every year, Kristine's extended family gathers to celebrate Christmas.  If you got us all together, there would be about 50 of us. That rarely happens, though, because a whole bunch live on the west coast.  With just the Manitoba crew, there is still about 35 and so we are much too large a group for someone's house. For the last couple of years, we have been meeting at a hotel in Brandon for the weekend and it is a nice way to celebrate the season, have some fun and stay in touch with everyone.  Here are some pictures of some of our activities...

We had a sleigh ride on Saturday. It was a pretty cold wind, but fun.

Matthew enjoyed his first sleigh ride. Rachel slept through it.

Matthew's 2nd birthday also fell on this weekend so we got him a cake to celebrate.

He did pretty good blowing out his own candles, with only a little help from Dad.

He had no problem eating it all by himself!

Rachel hanging out with another Auntie Trisha!

Swimming in the hotel pool. Always a good time.

Father-Son Bonding Time

For his birthday, Matthew got a Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar from Grandma Gerhard.  Because he is too little yet for the tiny pieces, it was also a gift for Daddy. The two of them have been diligently opening a little door every night and building the Lego together. Matthew looks forward to it. During the day, he will periodically point to the box sitting on the piano and tell me "wait Daddy".

You can tell they are working hard...see the tongue sticking out?

teamwork

 

The finished product.

Night-Night Rider

Matthew loves cars.  He has many of them and they all have names...red car, blue car, brown car, white car, yellow car, yellow van etc. He also has favourites. Blue car is one and so is this one, black car. We told him that this one was actually the Knight Rider car, also known as KITT.  Now he calls it Night-Night Rider car.  So funny.

Big Girl

Look at our little girl, getting so big.  She can hold her head up and so she is ready for sitting in her bumbo chair and the circle of neglect...

Next comes the Jolly Jumper!

Halloween

On Halloween this year, kids everywhere were very excited about both dressing up in their costumes and getting lots and lots of candy. But not our kids. Nope. Rachel didn't really know she was even wearing a costume, which was the case for Matthew last year. This year, he knew he was wearing something strange and he didn't like it.  We did manage to get him into it, but not without some tears.  And as for the candy, well, neither one of them could have cared less.

So we started out the day by going for a Halloween visit to Daddy's office.  One woman there was dressed up as a witch, complete with a green face and wart on her nose, and Matthew really wasn't too sure of that.  He looked like a tiger, but really he was much more akin to a kitten, so he held on tight to Daddy when she was around.

A tiger and his cars.

In his cage.

He eventually warmed up to the whole costume thing.  Briefly.

Instead of going from house to house that evening, doing the trick or treating thing, we headed over to the new house to hand out some candy, let Matthew see what this Halloween thing is all about and maybe get to meet some of our new neighbours.  We handed out the candy and Matthew thought it was quite exciting that we had so many people coming to our door, but wasn't so sure about their attire.  And we met a few neighbours over some hot chocolate.  Then we headed out to Auntie Lu's and Uncle D's for a quick Halloween visit and a photo:

Rachel the pea pod and Matthew the tiger.

Monthly Photos

We have been taking monthly pictures of Matthew since the beginning, and the same goes for Rachel. However it isn't until you look back (which you can thanks to this handy blog) or compare the two that you really realize how big Matthew has gotten in his almost 2 years and how small Rachel still is! Here are their 2 and 22 month shots respectively.

Rachel 2 Months

Matthew 22 Months

box

Still the best toy ever invented.