My favorite part about going home for the holidays is getting to spend time with friends and family. We typically play a lot of games, mostly apples to apples (which I love) and boggle (which I love even more... I think it may just be the best game ever invented!)
We also have a tradition in my family of always building ginger bread houses at Christmas. Leave it to Ben the architect to build a crazy round house. It was pretty fabulous.
On Christmas morning we open all of our presents in our pajamas like little kids. I will spare Ben the embarrassment of posting photos of him in his pajamas :) but I couldn't help posting this one of my sister. Just look at the excitement on her face! You'd never guess that gift was a pillow. Yes. A pillow. She's easy to please :)
She painted an amazing landscape (from a photo she took in Maui) for her boyfriend for his gift. Isn't it gorgeous? She is a super talented artist.
One of Ben's favorite gifts was his new photo toy. I think now we're going to have ridiculous numbers of photos of each other holding our cameras because every time I went to take a photo of him, he was pointing his camera right back at me. Oh dear.
After opening presents we usually go to visit friends at their house. This year they had a new dog that I'd never met before and Oh My Gosh it was about the cutest thing that I have ever seen. They're lucky I didn't steal her!
Ok so that's the Christmas photos... but now it's time for the new years batch! We headed out to Palm Springs for the weekend with my sister and Mark, John and Valena, and my parents. What better way to spend new years eve in the desert than going to an arcade and playing mini golf?
Allison has a photo-a-day blog which she had been sadly behind on updating due to a broken camera. She got it fixed for Christmas so it was back in action on this trip. Here she is in full photographer mode.
Mark and John tallying the score. I lost. By a lot. I do not have a golf career in my future :)
After mini golf we went back to the house and had some time to kill before midnight. So of course in an attempt to entertain ourselves we had to balance things on each others noses.
And play lots and lots of wii. I became addicted to the Rayman Rabbids game. The dancing bunnies are hilarious.
We got all festive with hilarious party hats and noise makers...
And at midnight had copious amounts of confetti.
At the end of the night we were all pretty wiped out. I think maybe those faces were from thinking about how hard it would be to clean up all the confetti :)
And to finish up the set... a ridiculous self portrait of Ben and I in party hats. Don't we look awesome?
All in all it was a wonderful holiday season. If you made it to the bottom of this post, congratulations. That was a lot of Regnier family holiday to wade through :) I hope you all had a wonderful new year. Stay tuned to the blog in the next few days, I'm heading out for my first wedding of the year on Thursday so there's lots of excitement yet to come!
