Well, Chanukah has come and gone... wait, has it been eight nights yet? We did a small celebration with a slew of gifts, mostly for the kiddies, but the first set of kids (that's us) got a pretty good haul as well! This shot only shows the gifts from Grandma and Grandpa, it doesn't include the pile from Aunt Julie and Uncle Gregg and Carly for Carly, or our gifts to Carly.











First we lit the candles... Carly had the honors...
















Then we got down to some serious gift opening...

First gift for Ever was some cute slippers that Carly picked out!





She also got some leopard pants, which she proceeded to eat...









Julie scrapped this "E" for Ever's room... (I'll hang it up as soon as I'm done here...)


and not shown, a Baby Ball Popper Toy that I'm sure she'll spend hours playing as soon as I set it up and a light-up flower garden toy that plays music and lights up.









From Grandma and Grandpa she got this cool light up gym....
(Photo to come...)
...and a gated playpen, a set of little balls with animals inside that roll around, a couple of stuffed animals, a doll from the Lennon Sisters that looks like the Lennon Sisters (anyone remember them?), and a couple of other things She cleaned up, basically.
And so did we, actually. For me and David, they got us a waffle maker (I've always wanted one), a HUGE Dream Dinners gift certificate (YUM!), a covered skillet (for all those Dream Dinners we'll be cooking), a couple of burger skillets - one for regular burgers and one for veggie burgers (yeah, that one's for David), some other cooking kinda stuff (some serving knives and some lobster bisque) and David got a set of golf balls. I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting but you get the idea.
Julie and I agreed not to give gifts for each other this year but we got a bunch of stuff for Carly. I'll only post a shot of the cookies though. Kathleen and I spent 2 days baking and decorating cookies. We used all of Kat's decorating supplies and expertise and she cleaned up all the mess (with some help from her husband Mike and friend Ron) THANKS GUYS! Next time we can make a mess at my house and I'll do all the cleaning! The cookies came out great, though, and they were quite tasty, I might add. I'm amazed we had any to give and didn't eat them all.












In addition to gifts, we had lots of great fam time... here's Ever with her Aunt Julie and cousin Carly...















...and here's Ever having a nice conversation with her Uncle Gregg... telling him about all the gifts she got...
"and I got one of these... and I got one of these..."















... and here's Ever enjoying a beer with her Papa...














okay, she didn't actually have any beer. But she did enjoy a nice bottle, that she held by herself, I might add...















Thanks everyone for all the great gifts!!
Oh, and by the way, stole a bunch of these pix from Julie's blog. :) Thanks, Juls!