Happy New Year!

 It's 2012. 

That means it's the fourth year that the girls have seen.  Doesn't that blow your mind? Where has this time gone?  I know it's going even faster because we've been so pleansatly busy.  After Christmas, we celebrated Grandma Rand's birthday.  While dining out has recently been a bit more of a challenge, that evening was made much easier by having a small party room virtually to ourselves.  The next night, we tested the theory again by dining in the special kitchen table at Buca di Beppo with Nana, Papa, Granny and Pop-pop.  We arrived after they'd ordered appetizers so there most of a plate of calamari at the table.  I handed Naomi one of the whole, breaded baby octopi, mostly as a joke, but she popped the whole thing in her mouth!  The rest of the meal was punctuated by many walkabouts through the restaurant.  It's a busy and distracting place.  During one of our tours, I noticed that Naomi was making a bit of a weird face.  I held my hand up in front of her mouth and received a whole, now-naked, baby octopi.  Disturbing.  She did not, however, hold back on the dessert  you see pictured here.  Yes, the giant one that virtually eclipses Nana.

We made a trip down to Cincinnati to see the whole crew there.  Here is William with all of his decendants, minus Vanessa. The girls had a grand time with their neices and nephew and fell in love with Honda the cat. Honda was wonderfully tolerant in return.  We all trekked out and enjoyed the first part of the Newport Aquarium the next day.  I'm sure they would have enjoyed the whole thing if naptime hadn't interfered.  There's supposed to be an aquarium opening in Cleveland in January so we'll have to check it out.    

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And, here is  Matthew, starring as Baby Near Year at our first annual New Toddler's Eve Party.  We had eight adults and eight kids under 5 here to ring in the new year at Greenwich Mean Time. It was a hoot.  We had a dance party, tooted on noisemakers and dropped the disco ball at 7:00.  All the guests were gone by 8, the dishes were done and our movie started by 9.  Perfect.  Here are the girls, playing with a strangulation hazard.  Or, one of those plastic leis that, when unraveled, is big enough to contain fully half of our party guests.