Week by week 27

(December 27-January 2). Ahh! The end of a year! The last week of 2009 was also our last week in Utah. We spent the remainder of our time at my parents house . This is what we did.
James played a lot. He played with Grandma Shelley (and a balloon). He also got a haircut halfway through the week. You can easily see which pictures are pre and post haircut. It snowed this week and James helped with the shoveling (with help from his cousin Ashlyn). He also further helped to destroy my mom's Christmas tree. (Sorry mom!) And he played with his toys. It was a good week with family.
John-Luke got lots of attention from his aunt Karen (notice her sniffing his head in one of the pictures). He played with all of his grandparents and worked on his cuteness and crawling skills. John-Luke also turned 6 months old this week! The time has flown by with this little guy. He is truly an angel! I get comments daily (no lie) from friends to random strangers on how good and calm he is. He is so nice to have around. He makes our life so much better and we "lub" him to death!
This week Brian and I continued to take advantage of having "help" around. We took some self-portraits with my new camera! Aren't we cute? And we also took some naps and ran some errands.
Here is my dad! He did great with James and John-Luke and helped out a lot. James now likes to make "Edpa shakes" all the time so that he can be healthy and big just like Edpa! Every time we give him a cup or anything that can be imagined to be a cup he pretends to make a shake (sound effects and all). It is great! He sure loves his Edpa!
I also very much enjoyed irritating my brother "Boy" (as he affectionately called in our family). I'm not sure what it is about him but he sure is fun to bug! No, we haven't grown up enough to not bother each other yet! We have too much fun doing it. We played lots of games and I love to rub it in every time I win (I'm pretty competitive). It was the most I've seen him in a while.
And here is my super-smart, amazing, talented, accommodating mom! Thanks for a great stay! She got us food that we liked to eat and helped a lot with those early mornings when the kids were not adjusted (like 4 am or earlier). She also got strep throat from James (as did my sister, Wu and my brother-in-law, Nick). (Sorry again!) My mom even liked my haircut so much that she went and got one for herself. She has more bangs though. Isn't she a hottie?
I also did A LOT of shopping this last week to make sure that I had everything I wanted to take home with me (thank heaven for Amazon Prime shipping)!
We flew back to Geneva on December 31, 2009 (yes, we spent New Year's in the air and no, they didn't make a fuss about it while we were flying). We arrived Jan. 1, 2010. So we had a pretty uneventful New Year's but I must say that it was the easiest flight with 2 kids that we have had so far. No meltdowns and not too many wiggles either (considering their respective ages). When we got home we just tried very unsuccessfully to readjust. We ended up paying for 2 extra bags and 4 of our 5 bags were overweight. They had pity on us and didn't charge anything for the overweight even though they were over by more than a couple pounds!
When we got home only 2 of our bags arrived with us so we were able to take 1 taxi (instead of 2) home and save that money. They delivered our bags later that afternoon. Here are a few pics of us after we arrived home. Can you tell Brian was wishing he were in bed and not helping with kids at 2 am? I was too!
In case you didn't know, John-Luke is VERY ticklish! It is so fun to torture that baby! And James had fun running around in his mushroom hat that he got at a primary activity.
As fun as it is to go see family it is also super fun to be home!