Winter Fun in the Bailey House - Part 1

 Winter isn't fun, that headline is hilarious...

I  have to go waaaay back to Christmas here - we had a nice holiday party at Grammi and Bean's house where Bean got to read Twas the Night Before Christmas to his three youngest grandkids (poor Seth is nearly 21 but he still gets lumped in here!)  Why do my kids insist on doing these faces??

Todd and I also went to see comedian Jim Gaffigan with our friends Cooch and Rob - super fun show!

Naturally, we had to do some holiday baking. These cookies are always everyone's favorite!

You already know that there is a big hole in the roof of our house (you can see the patch near the chimney in the above picture) but we had yet ANOTHER storm that caused our flagpole to snap in half only MOMENTS after my car had been parked there! I dropped the kids off at the bus stop and came back to find this!

The storm also caused our fence to fall over. And as you can see by my neighbors yard, we NEED this fence to be upright.

Todd MacGuyver'd it into place (but it's since fallen over again in the other direction).

Of course, we had the holidays and all of the traditions that come with that. Like Christmas Eve dinner at Uno's in Framingham.  Hilariously, we had the same waitress as last year!  How cute are my boys here?

And of course, a picture of me and my girl on Christmas Eve.

Family selfie at dinner! I couldn't decide between the two of these so I included them both ha ha. Grant has an alien hand in the first picture!

We went back home to try to take some family pictures in front of our (second) tree, and while Todd was playing with the remote feature on his Apple Watch, Grant decided to be funny and jump in front of us - silly guy!

Ahhh. Now that's more like it.

The traditions continued - with the kids throwing reindeer dust so Rudolph and Co. could find our house.

And of course, Todd read Twas the Night Before Christmas and everyone had to act like they were surprised by the story.

There's a lot of pictures I could have chosen to sum up our Christmas morning and Christmas Day, but this one was really something.

And of course, we went to the Cucci house for the annual holiday party. I felt particularly old this year because Michelle's daughter Kaitlyn joined us (and was able to drink with us!) This party is always a ridiculously good time!

I think my favorite Twitter account is this one.  Each day, they post that it's NOT Ted Danson's birthday (and I make this announcement to my family). Until... it WAS his birthday! Truly a reason to celebrate.

In January, we had a snowstorm, but our snow blower died.  Good thing we have four snow shovelers!

It was pretty the next day though!

I saw this meme and it was the funniest meme I think I have ever seen. Only because I had those salt and pepper shakers! And I literally thought I was the only one who ever had those.

I had to travel a bit for work, including a trip up to beautiful Plymouth, New Hampshire.  It's the home of Plymouth State University, so I took some pictures for Natalie in case she was interested.  There was a lot of snow!

And as if having a hole in our roof, a flagpole that broke in half, and a fence that fell over wasn't bad enough... our hot water heater started leaking!  So there's another unexpected expense!

This hole is still here in February, thanks for asking.

We had a little birthday celebration for my dear sister-in-law Kathleen, who had a (number with a zero after it) birthday in February.  Games were played, and Madison was NOT happy when she kept giving the right answers and not getting credit for it!

Well, it was bound to happen. And Madison is tall, too!

Girl cousins playing a hilarious game of Off Topic on KK's birthday.

We went out for a delicious dinner for Kathleen's birthday down at Mezza Luna in Buzzard's Bay with the whole (well, okay maybe only half of the) gang!

The view of the good looking people on the OTHER side of the table.

I know everyone was so excited to take a cousins photo after dinner.  Especially since they were all holding their leftovers. But they're such CUTE cousins!

After dinner, everyone was full, so Carole decide to do a little DJ'ing for us. Ok, maybe she wasn't - but it sure looks like she is!  She was definitely enjoying the new keyboard that Warren got her.

I have THE funniest story about these scratchies that we got KK for her birthday but I doubt that anyone else would think it was funny!  We laughed so hard we were crying! FOUR!

I've been doing a lot of running this year, but this was a first for me.  Apparently someone let their dog off of their leash and it chased this coyote out of the woods and into the street where I was running. He didn't seem to want anything to do with me, thankfully. 

We went back to Plymouth for Grammi's 85th birthday celebration and Todd made a delicious roast beef with an herb butter melted on top of it. Natalie was so blown away by how good the butter was on the roast beef that she literally started crying! ONLY Natalie!

I think this is Grammi's all-knowing look.  Once you reach 85, you can give people this look, too. Kathleen made this beautiful and delicious lemon meringue pie and a good time was had by all of the Bailey family celebrating our Grammi.

Stay tuned for part 2 of the winter fun in the Bailey house!