Christmas

Spoiled! In one word Mj was spoiled this Christmas. We spent Christmas Eve over at my mom's house with the whole family including Ginger, Sam, and Sam Jr. who flew in from Ohio. MJ is the only baby in my family so he had everyones attention 100% of the time. He had a ball even though he was sick and had serious snot issues which you can see in all our photos. Grandma Patrick got him a rocking horse, big surprise, and although he is still a little small for it he loved petting it. He got tons of toys and especially loves his little boom box from Aunt Molly.

Christmas morning was the best one of my entire life. The three of us got up early and exchanged presents. MJ was actually really good at tearing open his presents, although once he got them open he still just wanted to eat the wrapping paper. Between Santa, his family in NY and California he had plenty to open. As MJ's gift to us he crawled for the first time. Daycare had been telling us that he was crawling for weeks but he waited until Christmas to debut his new talent.

The morning was pretty exhausting so afterwards we all took a family nap. Then it was off to church!

Christmas Day was spent at Julies with the whole gang together again. It was crazy with all of the kids and I can only imagine what next year will be like with all of them mobile. Plus we will have the addition of Tali and Miki's babies. MJ and Taylor were adorable playing together. Taylor would roll MJ the ball and he would bat it back. Riley is getting huge and cuter by the day but he not quite big enough to play with the big boys, yet. MJ once again got to open and eat tons of presents.

Thanksgiving

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with tons of family and way too much food. We spent the day at Julies house and the whole Monek gang was there. Cindy, Micky, and Michelle even came up from California. Little Michael loved seeing all the people and getting all the attention, especially from his three gorgeous cousins. Uncle Greg even took time out to hold both MJ and Riley (pictures of this can be found in our online photo album). Greg also took time to challenge John is an arm wrestling competition thinking had an advantage since John hurt his back. No such luck, John beat him handily (I have it on video if anyone wants to relive the moment). MJ joined in on Thanksgiving dinner by eating Gerber's "Turkey Dinner" baby food.

That weekend we also had a mini Thanksgiving for just Mike, MJ and I. We made a whole turkey and ended up with leftovers for a week. After turkey with gravy, turkey sandwiches, turkey chili, turkey stew, and a gobbler cobbler, we don't want to see turkey again for another year.