Some Christmas photos

This is perhaps my favorite photo from this Christmas season:

It's the annual Grandkid Picture with my folks.  This year, with two new grandkids, I though it would be fun to buy them matching pajamas for the photo.  My sisters and I managed to get all the kids dressed and happy at the same time.  But Cooper would absolutely not have anything to do with the photo.  So he's sitting on my knee and I'm leaning backwards to avoid the photo and give the pretense that he's actually in the grandkid line-up.

Another good one -- my niece Vada, my grandma Marlene, and my sister Carmen:

Next, Cooper's guitar-playing friend Woody.  Cooper first met him at Carmen and Toban's house in Portland.  Alan hunted one down on eBay for Coop.

He loved it.  And, true to form, couldn't care less about Woody.  Just wants to play the guitar.

We also had a Christmas celebration on New Year's Eve with Michael, Kristen, and Parker.  Coop got this great fishing game, which we've played at least 12 times since then.

And he got this chocolate penguin.

Which was gone in an impressive 45 minutes.

My sister Kelly gave me Amish Friendship Bread starter for Christmas -- a ziploc bag of goop that you feed and massage for ten days, and then you bake two loaves of bread and give the rest of the starter to four friends so they can enjoy the bread.

I only have one friend who was interested in the starter, so Cooper and I baked bread with ALL of the rest of the mixture.

I looked on-line for variations of the basic cinnamon-sugar-bread recipe, so I have chocolate-chocolate chip bread, pumpkin bread, and blueberry bread, in addition to the cinnamon sugar kind.

It's fantastically delicious, and although in theory only Amish people know the recipe for the starter, you can find it on-line if you're interested in making some yourself!