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it is busy here in the johnston household as we prepare for the annual padmos christmas vacation. we are off to st. lucia this year and gone are the days of no worries as we sip grant's rum punch and watch our brothers and sisters chase after their kids. now we are already worried about whether we have enough baby food and diapers and we haven't even left the house yet. it will be an adventure, to say the least.
as i was getting out our passports, i had a little chuckle as i looked at gerrit's picture and thought the rest of you might enjoy it too. hugh and i took gerrit to the post office to get his first passport when he was about 6 weeks old (going on 85 in the picture). if you look closely, you will notice it is actually a picture of hugh and gerrit as hugh is holding him up against the backdrop. the funniest part is that he will have this picture until he is 5.
we have had a busy weekend of
basketball games, packing, dinner with friends, and a web cam christmas with the johnstons and sharps in colorado on saturday morning. we hope each of you has a very merry christmas and we will be back with more monkey tales in the new year.
this past weekend we celebrated "christmas" with the padmos family with a gift exchange. our tradition is to draw names between the kids and grandkids and then open them when the den dulks arrive in california from michigan. we had a bit of a dilemma this year as the den dulks aren't making a trip out to california, but meeting us all in st. lucia. so we had to get a bit creative this year for our gift exchange--in comes the christmas web cam!
all those in california gathered around beppe and pake's computer while the den dulks gather around theirs in grand rapids and via the web cam we watched everyone open each others gifts. it was chaotic, but not necessarily the same chaos that occurs when six grandchildren (now seven with gerrit) open presents in beppe and pake's living room leaving behind ribbons, boxes, tissue, and opened
toy boxes. check out the photo of arie opening his gift in california as ellie watches in michigan.we even got great-grandma padmos talking on the web cam. if it boggles our heads, i sure would like to know what is going on in her mind. on the right is a picture of grandma padmos talking to ellie, abel, and peri.
gerrit enjoyed his first "christmas." of course, he probably enjoyed eating the tissue, chewing on the ribbons and climbing in the boxes a little more this year. he is looking forward to another web cam christmas this coming weekend as we exchange gifts with the sharps and oma and grandpa in colorado.
there seems to be no stopping gerrit now. he has mastered the crawl, is on the move, and seems to want to, and can, get into everything of mommy and daddy's. it is like babies are born with this inside knowledge of what is a toy and then a radar to find everything that isn't. he still gets excited when he spots something, like he did when he was "creeping," but now we just have a little less time to get between the object and the crawler.
check out a rather lengthy video of the crawler below.
