Oh my! It's been a while!

In the mid-holiday "calm" I wanted to take a few more pictures of John, especially with some of the fantastic blankets and gifts he has been given.  Including this one from a dear friend:

 John on the floor doesn't last long in our house before one of the big kids jumps in and does this:

 There were many outtakes and some great frustration from me and though I LOVE that they love their little brother their enthusiasm quickly becomes chaos and then tears so I struggle to include them in pictures.  However, this time all our patience paid off as I got this picture of all three.  Apparently they need to be lying down to help with their enthusiastic wiggles around John.

 And of course they both wanted to hold John.  Catherine managed to hold him for a few seconds:

We decided to leave John alone for a while so Matthew grabbed a book to read to him:

 John was only partially interested:

 But once he woke up he was ready to join in:

In actual reading, Matthew has been making great strides.  John is less than impressed with sight word reading:

 And he is also less than impressed with walking to and from school, but he looks absolutely adorable doing it:

 I'm so thankful Matthew's teacher sends us photos.  I'm thinking I've trained Matthew well regarding being somewhat amenable to photos as there's generally a good one of him included in the set.  Then again, we all know kids behave much more admirably for their teachers than their parents!  Matthew was so proud of this gingerbread house and after sharing exactly 12 pieces with Catherine, he managed to devour most of while we were distracted during after dinner games:

 We got a few real snowstorms and Matthew found our goggles and decided to take on the snowblower.  Matthew believes he won but the amount of snow he brought into the house says otherwise:

 And oh my goodness, baby John has lost most of his baby hair and is left with this adorable old man hairline.  His next round of hair is coming in quite nicely but this little stripe absolutely cracks me up!

At this point my photo importing got glitchy and I have some massive deleting/renaming to do but in the interest of catching up on sharing the non-Facebook stuff I'll stop right now and hopefully come back sooner rather than later!