Sunday, January 5, 2014

New Year's in Michigan

Traveling is tiring.  Traveling with little children is exhausting.  We spent this past week in Michigan with my family, which was wonderful and well worth the exhaustion.  But we are exhausted nonetheless and came back to Duluth with a sick toddler and are spending today resting and recovering before Eli goes back to work tomorrow.

Kai was an all-star traveler.  He slept the entire time on his first flight from Minnesota to Michigan.  And he was easy-going as he got passed around from person to person throughout the week.  He's truly a good baby and it was fun to introduce him to the rest of my family and show off his sweet face!




On New Year's Eve we put the kids to bed and played games.  We even played Pictionary!  It's been years since anyone had played this game, but my parents still had a whiteboard tucked away downstairs so we hauled it out and tested our artistic ability.  It was really fun and helped us stay awake till midnight, which wasn't the easiest thing to do this year!




We celebrated Christmas on New Year's Day and attempted to get a photo of all the grandkids in their jammies.  This was the best we could get.  Not too bad, all things considered.  Caleb was the most uncooperative and wouldn't hold still no matter how hard we tried.  Alas, that's the way it goes with little people!




Caleb's cousin is only 8 months older than him and he loves trains right now.  Caleb has shown a lot of interest in cars and planes and trains recently so it was fun to watch these two little boys be boys together :)




Then it was time for ice skating on the pond!  We used to ice skate a lot growing up so it's fun to get the kids out on the ice and watch them play and fall down and play some more.  Caleb had a great time, although he wore boots rather than ice skates :)






We also spent a day at my sister's house where all the Clarks had gathered for a Christmas celebration.  It was wonderful to see everyone!  There were two other new babies born this fall so everyone was passing around the babies in between playing games and snacking throughout the day.








It was a great trip to Michigan.  We felt like it wasn't enough time, but that's the way it goes.  There's never enough time during the holidays!

When we returned to Minnesota we made a quick trip to the Sea Life Aquarium at the Mall of America.  Caleb loves sea creatures right now: dolphins, whales, shark, fish...anything that moves in the water.  We knew he'd love it so we splurged and spent the money to see the fish, and Caleb was definitely in heaven :)  He loves saying "shark" although it sounds a lot like "sh--" when he says it, so we've been laughing for weeks at his pronunciation and tried to keep his shouting to a minimum as he exclaimed over the sharks in the tanks, lest anyone think we're teaching our child bad words at home :)








 So now we're home again and Caleb has currently been napping for almost four hours.  That kid is tired.  He needs to recuperate from all the travels and fun and people.  And since it feels like -23 degrees outside right now, it's a great day to stay inside and rest up.  Tomorrow starts the beginning of another week of another year in the House of Horn!


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