Whew...what a celebration!

Whew... what a ride!  The Holidays were wonderful!  Full of family, friends, fun, travel, sledding, swimming, more family, more family and more family. Luckily, we like them!  :) The last 7 days were a great way to celebrate the reason for Christmas and the many blessings we receive from the Lord!

Following our Christmas celebration at my parents house, we went to my sisters house for two days.  They have a hot tub and the girls and all the nieces and nephews had a blast swimming around while the air temperature was around 15 degrees. 
We also went evening sledding with my sister and brother and their families...this could have been a disaster since there wasn't very much snow in Grafton and the snow that was on the hill was mostly ice.  But no matter how many injuries we all sustained, we laughed the whole way through.  There were air borne moments as we flew  over the ice bump created in the middle of the hill (and I mean flew, as in up off of the earth to come crashing back as if someone threw us back at the hill), there were moments in the trees when the sleds were out of control and more that one person ended up with a face full of tree branches, and the collisions could have been deadly but we had a blast laughing every time some flew over that bump or crashed at the bottom.  Luckily we were the only ones on the hill.
After sledding we took the girls to their first restaurant here in America....it was Mexican....so Randy felt right at home speaking Spanish to the girls again! 

We finally made our way back from Grafton with a cool 24 hours to unpack, clean the house, prep food, shop for food in preparation for Randy's 3 brothers and their families to arrive to celebrate with the Gehrke's for 3 nights.  It has become a tradition to host the whole Gehrke clan over New Year's since we do not get to see each other on Christmas...a cherished time for all of us...all 15 of us!  We were able to spend some fun times at the YMCA playing full court basketball, soccer and volleyball.  Then we headed to the local sledding hill with more success than in Grafton.  My sister and brother were all at my parents cabin (only an hour from Wausau) and were able to come for the day to enjoy the sledding, the activities, the Packer game and dinner.  It was a great day but Roxy and Valya took it fairly hard when they had to say good bye to my sister and brother and families....I'm not sure if they knew it would be the last time they would see them but it was pretty difficult.  Their little hearts have experienced so much loss already and my heart was breaking for their sadness.

 New Year's Eve we did our traditional bowling night with the whole gang.  I think this was the first time the girls ever bowled, once we got the bumpers up for them, they had a blast!  They were so excited in the last game, they both broke 100!  We were all cheering with lots of high 5's!

We are looking forward to settling back into our routine with the kids going back to school tomorrow.  I'm going to have to figure out what to do with the girls everyday now that we're not celebrating, shopping, traveling or hosting guests. 
We have 15 more days with the girls and I hope that we can use each one to show them the Grace of God and the love of family!