Post-Christmas Visit to Mississippi Campbells

Troy has been growing up way too fast recently (as children usually do, we are told). Recently, he so desperately wants to be involved in a conversation that if he can't think of anything to say he will fake cough twice and then say "bless you," to which he expects you to respond, "bless you Troy." As with all conversations with Troy, if you do not acknowledge the word he has chosen to say he will repeat it until you do, and Troy is very, very patient in these matters. His favorite words to repeat are: a.) prayer; b.) Amen; and c.) bless you. What a righteous son we have! Sometimes over supper we have said four or five prayers just to satisfy our child's need to bless the food. I mean...come on...we're eating vegetables -- it only needs to be blessed once, right? Nope. Not in our casa.

We will have to do a new blog post soon about Troy's new favorite games, but this is probably one of them. We'll call it "Cape" because it has no other name and because what you do is put on a cape and pretend you are flying. How about that for originality.

January 11th through the 16th we decided to visit the Mississippi Campbells, despite Troy and Dad each being independently sick (Troy with Croop; Dad with a Virus). Both were medicated and everything was supposed to be peachy. But then Troy kind of got worse and Dad experienced a series of unfortunate events that left him out of commission for almost the entire vacation, mostly quarantined in the bedroom. (As such, most of these pictures were taken by Cristy, and unfortunately we didn't do much because of aforementioned sicknesses.)

As evidence of said sickness, please see exhibit A, Troy's unusually slender belly (for him it was slender -- really).

One of the first things we saw in Mississippi (and Nathaniel's favorite part of the vacation) was Jack's awesome display of Jedi mastery in the lightsaber. We have two videos of this, but sadly the videos are too large to post online :( We have a new camera and we didn't lower the quality of the video enough :( But take Nathaniel's word for it -- some of Jack's move will be written in the archives of the Jedi Masters forever. That's the truth. You should see his roll attack!

Kevi was a quite observer for most of the vacation (symptom of three older siblings?) but boy does that boy love to climb around in the kitchen.

The weather was nice and though we didn't get out too much it was fun to watch the kids play in the backyard.

Cheerio Necklace for the Green Giant!

Sadie is all the fashion these days :) Take tips Cristy :)

We never thought a person could do 100 cartwheels without having some sort of negative physiological reaction. We were wrong. This was probably Maddie's 39th out of over 100 cartwheels, exactly 100 of which she did in a row. IMPRESSIVE! Look at that form.

Going for a walk to deliver food whilst Nathaniel sleeps. Again.

We were entertained by no less than 4 acrobatic shows over a two day period. Pretty good stuff here. Cirque du Soleil quality really. Maybe even Vegas -- who knows. But remember you read it here first.

No matter what Aunt Cristy tries to do, she is physically and emotionally incapable of bringing/buying gifts for family on vacation. There are far worse traits :) Enjoy the video camera girls! Enjoy the bow and arrows Jack!

Maddie says, "what WHAT?!?"