Happy Birthday Dad!

In the midst of the Christmas chaos at the lake, we celebrated Dad's birthday.  It was slightly scaled down from last year's big bash when he turned 60...but it was a celebration none the less.

Gluten free cupcakes on Saturday night

and birthday presents on Sunday morning (his actual birthday).

Christmas at the Lake

We celebrated Christmas with my mom's side of the family last weekend at the lake with our cousins from South Carolina.  Fulton and Caleb had a fun time playing with each other.  They're looking forward to Samuel joining in on the fun soon as well as Caleb's baby brother that will be here in a few months.

Fulton has finally mastered walking!  He has been able to walk for months, just didn't really want to.  Now he is everywhere...not that he wasn't already :)

after a round of Dirty Santa/White Elephant, it was time for the real gifts

Matt and Mark modeling some of the gag gifts in the top left picture above

Caleb loved his drill and "gobbles" and Fulton mowed his little lawnmower over everyone's feet

Us girls swapped ornaments after all the other gifts were opened

The middle picture is hilarious!  We're trying to get a picture of all the girls holding up their ornament and about the time Steven was snapping the camera, Fulton took off up the stairs.  So Pops went after him and then everyone turned around to look...well almost everyone...Kristen and Katie were ready for the picture!

the whole gang

Surprisingly this only took a few tries before we got a decent one.  Hard to believe since there were quite a few on the edge of a breakdown

The rest of Thanksgiving

After my last post, blogger said that I was out of room.  So I've been procrastinating the past few weeks about what to do...start a new blog, or just starting paying for this one.  So I sat back down today to finish Thanksgiving, and what do you know, it let me post more pictures (without paying), so I'm just going to keep trying until it won't let me again.

I know it's kind of silly to pay, even though there are only two people that read this anymore, but I do enjoy it when I make time for it.  I'll never be as faithful of a blogger like sister.

Back to Thanksgiving...

after we got home from FL, we had a few hours at home to catch our breath and then it was time to head over to Mom and Dad's to eat with my mom's side of the family.

Fulton is so fun and he sure does love his Pops!  They had a fun time playing in the floor after we ate.

Can't believe tomorrow is Christmas Eve! 

Thanksgiving in Ft Lauderdale

The weekend before Thanksgiving we headed to Ft Lauderdale to visit Steven's family and celebrate Thanksgiving with them.

As always, we had a great time...playing volleyball (which I am not good at by the way...no surprise), playing ping pong, and just hanging out

We spent one day by the pool and what was left of the beach (due to the weather taking most of the beach away), and then dinner at Jerry's hotel by the pool.

We picked strawberries one day, which made for delicious strawberry pie for Thanksgiving dessert

We also went down to Pompano Beach one afternoon

Steven, Keri, Abi, Bailee, Nik, Carson

(missing Jen)

it is safe to say that we did plenty of eating while we were there :)

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving with Steven's parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and extended family and friends on Wednesday night

Ready for dinner...

Sadly, we left bright and early the next morning for Alabama.