Walking and late Christmas

So, I finally got a few of Luke's steps on video, not the best but here it is. Also we still have a few boxes and bags out from our trip to IN so please excuse the mess. (-:

Today (Saturday the 10th) we celebrated Christmas with my mom's side of the family. It was lots of fun seeing my cousins and family who life further away. They actually spent the night at my grandparents this time so we got lots of good time in with them. It was especially fun watching Luke interact with them. I am by far the oldest of that group of cousins, and the youngest is 6 or 7 I think, so there were plenty of younger kids for Luke to run around with even though he is the only great-grandchild. He kept up a frenzied pace for most of the afternoon and then fell fast asleep right when it got time to open presents. (-: He took a pretty good nap but when he woke up I think he had had enough of all the new people and wanted something more low key so my parents and Greg and I took turns playing with him in more secluded areas of the house for most of the rest of the evening with a few exceptions.

I love celebrating Christmas with all our different families, each one is so unique. The best part for me about all of them is the family time. The food is always wonderful, but different with each family. Greg's family grills, his extended family on one side usually goes out to eat and on the other side we have authentic home-made Mexican food. My family usually has chip dip with veggies and fresh fruit for supper with stritzel for dessert and wassail to drink. One of my extended families has ham as the center of the meal with variations of potatoes and veggies etc. surrounding it. On my other extended side we eat traditional Russian food, verenike with ham gravy as the main dish. Yum!!!!

My family is decidedly more emotional than Greg is, one of my grandma's cries before every family meal when we sing grace. On the other side we have a tradition of reading a (religious)Christmas children's story before opening presents and usually get a new book each year. This year we just picked one we already had since we have quite the collection already. My grandpa always reads it and at some point he his voice breaks and soon out comes the hankie! This year we got both him and my grandma laughing until they cried before he started crying sentimental tears! This is my favorite picture from the bunch.

My cousins took almost all our pictures this year, which makes for interesting picture viewing after the fact. Some of them turned out really great. I'm hoping my uncle will share the pictures he got with us because he has a really nice camera and all the adults passed his camera around while all the kids took turns with ours. (-: Kate got each of the cousins (excluding my family and including herself) with one of their Christmas presents.

Greg had all the kids playing a game called Rum and Pirates!

Here is a quick video of Luke walking across the room in the middle of the Christmas story (which he did several times!). He kinda stole the show. (-: You also get a quick glimps of almost everyone that was there, but you have to watch fast!