Ping Pong Anyone?

For Christmas Joseph wanted a sheet of plywood that he could turn into a table top ping pong table. I had no idea what kind of plywood he would want for this project so I just gave him a note wrapped up telling him to buy his board.

This past weekend we went to Lowe's and bought a sheet of fiber board and some green paint. Joseph spent Saturday painting his table.

Today we enjoyed a lot of fun family time with the ping pong table. The fiber board was a great choice because the ball bounces really well on it. The board is almost but not quite regulation size but we don't really have room in our house for a true ping pong table. This piece of wood just leans up against the garage wall and when we want to play we will just take our kitchen table out to the garage and we'll be all set for a game.

Here are some pictures of our fun times. Everyone had to get in on the action.






Kimball with his Lego transformer that Joseph built for him.

Christmas 2011

We had a great Christmas. We came back home from St. Louis so we could have Christmas at home. I love being able to have Christmas at home where we can have our children be the focus of our Christmas morning fun...we can also just get up when the kids wake up.

Christmas Eve we watched The Year Without Santa Claus and ate treats. Before bed we read How the Grinch Stole Christmas, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas and the Christmas story out of the Bible.

Christmas morning we started opening presents about 6:30 when Rebecah woke up. We planned on only opening a few presents since church was at 10:00, but the present opening went so quickly we were able to open all of the presents before church.

For breakfast we ate orange rolls...alas, the children didn't care for them so Joseph and I enjoyed them and shared with the missionaries.

Rebecah's present from Santa was a kitchen. It was smaller than Santa thought, but she loves it...Kimball does too for that matter.



Rebecah's pony from Grandma and Grandpa.



Sitting with Mom to open a present.



Rebecah's "Fur Real" cat. She LOVES all animals and she carries this little cat around all of the time. Kimball likes the cat too and wanted to know why he didn't get one.



Opening "I Must Have Bobo!" She and Joseph both love the story so it was fitting that she was sitting with him when she opened it. We have read it multiple times already.



For some reason we didn't take any pictures of Kimball opening presents aside from his Santa present. He was always so fast to open things and then hand it off to Joseph to have him open the boxes.

Kimball with his Santa present. We are now pet owners of 4 goldfish. Kimball likes his fish but he wants to feed them all of the time and it's hard for him to understand that fish only need to eat once a day. (Santa really had to convince Mrs. Claus that fish were a good idea. We'll see how we do as pet owners...vacation time will be tricky.)



Kimball playing with his new race car track from Grandma and Grandpa.



You can see Joseph in the background working on one of Kimball's transformers...some of those are really hard to figure out at first.



Joseph's new fleece jacket.



My new Christmas dress from White Elegance.



We had my friend, Julia Huffine, over for Christmas dinner. She is a wonderful Grandma to the children and the kids enjoyed the little finger games she played with them. We ate ham, stuffing, green beans, cranberry salad, and pistachio salad for dinner and for dessert we had a sweet potato coconut pie with marshmallow meringue.

Annette and the children with Sister Huffine.



We had a wonderful Christmas and I hope all of you did as well.

Birthdays

Joseph and I both come from large families so there are a LOT of birthdays in our combined family. With 365 days in a year there are plenty of days to go around...or one would think...that isn't the case in our two families. We have quite a few shared birthdays and some very close calls...Take a look:

Joseph's dad and Ethan
Joseph's mom and Jared
Jonathan and Amy
Mandy and Grandma Zimmerman
Dominic and Chandra
Cadence and Victoria

Here are the close calls with birthdays back to back:
Melissa and Sharon
Nathan and Annette
Valerie and Matthew
Mandy/Grandma Z and Samantha
Aaron Coffey and Chandra/Dominic
David and Victoria/Cadence
Katie and My dad even though he isn't alive anymore

There is no telling what will happen with the next three babies that are due in the spring. There are enough birthdays in March, April and May that it is very possible for the new babies to end up sharing a birthday or having a close call with some family members.

Other exciting happenings...

In addition to attending graduation many other exciting things occurred while we were in St. Louis.

Leslie had her baby on the 13th so we were able to meet Baby Dominic and attend his baby blessing. Leslie was amazing and was so gracious to welcome about 30 people in to her home one week after having Dominic so all of the visiting family could be present for Dominic's blessing. It was a neat experience and I was glad we could be there.



The Coffey family members present for the baby blessing.



We also went down to visit my family for the afternoon. It was good to see my mom, Heather, Laura, and Amy. We also saw Chandra before she went to work for about 2 minutes.

Two days after seeing Laura we went to visit her again, this time in the hospital so we could see her new baby...David. He is a big boy with so much hair. We stood and watched at the nursery while he had his bath and I loved watching his hair fluff after he was clean. I was glad he came Wednesday evening since we left for home Thursday morning.



All clean! It was fun to watch Rebecah just stand motionless watching all of the babies. She usually is running all over!



We also enjoyed seeing some of Joseph's siblings that we haven't seen for a while.

It was a nice trip but we are excited to be home so we can finish preparing for Christmas. The kids had a great time with Grandma and Grandpa and the different toys. Kimball told me that he wanted to live at Grandma and Grandpa's house. When I told him we couldn't because we needed to go home for Christmas he said we needed to go back to visit in 5 days after Christmas was over!

Graduation!

Joseph's mom graduated from UMSL(University of Missouri at St. Louis) with a Bachelor's Degree in Communications last weekend. Deborah has always been very supportive of our family...when we have moved, had babies, etc...so it was important for us to be there to support her in her big achievement. She not only graduated but she did so with highest honors graduating summa cum-laude. I was so excited and proud of her. I honestly felt as happy for her as I would my own mother.

The kids did fairly well during the graduation ceremony and we enjoyed looking for Grandma and waving to her.

Grandpa, Kimball and Joseph waiting for graduation to start.



The Graduate!

Nagazines

As mentioned on the Thanksgiving post for this year, Kimball calls my mom "Naga". Earlier this year she gave Kimball and Rebecah a subscription to National Geographic Kids. The newest issue came yesterday and I told Kimball that a magazine from Naga had come. A few minutes later Kimball said: "I think we should call these "nagazines"". It was pretty funny. Nagazines it is!

Family Pictures

When my family visited for Thanksgiving we took some family pictures with Heather's nice camera. It's amazing what a nice camera does! Here are a few of the pictures.