New Year's Eve 2012 with Hardingers

This visit blended right into Shawn and Kim's visit.  They left Monday late morning, and my family arrived right around noon.
Rachel had been busting it in the kitchen, prepping baking for the family's meal, planned for around 2 pm.  She heated up a smoked ham which she had sent directly from a smokehouse in NY, and also made potatoes, asparagus with hollandaise sauce, cranberry-orange sauce for the meat, creamed corn, and wine.  The meal was very delicious!  I asked Rachel to do the meal planning/cooking to make this visit with my family possible so I didn't have to do that part.
I wish I remembered more details about this visit.  I was pretty tired from our long day of travel.  Still great to be with family though!  Jay and Molly came up with Stella.  She's changing a lot!  Mouth full of teeth, eating lots of food, and crawling around!  We learned a new game called Malarky and discovered that my mom is a good maker-upper-of-answers-to-weird-questions.  We played the telephone pictionary game again too later in the day.  Violet played along with us and did GREAT.  She's a good reader and drawer and thoroughly enjoyed playing with us.  I think she felt very grown up.  Rachel served up some meatballs, fancy cheese, crackers, bacon wrapped shrimp, and other snacky stuff for the night's food.

A few pics from the visit -

Shawn and Kim gave us a wooden peg thing to decorate as a family project.  My mom and Violet took to that right away.  Calvin just wanted to color on his own.

Violet was eager to pour and flip pancakes on her own on Tues morning, Jan 1st ~ she did a great job.

 Eli and Stella!

 2 pics of Stella:

Uncle Jay created a treasure hunt after being inspired by the pirate hats that Violet and Calvin created with black construction paper and a little help printing and cutting out skulls and crossbones.  I drew up a map of the house on the main floor which got taped to the front panel of the box to give them directions.  Dave helped the kids make a "boat" out of cardboard, and Jay hid treasure all over the house and marked it on the map with a yellow dot.  This kept them entertained for hours.  So fun for them!!

 Eli and Rachel

 She came up with the idea to make snowflakes with coffee filters - they loved making those too.