Holiday Pictures

Greetings! It's snowing large, wet flakes as the white winter wonderland of Westlake gets whiter by the minute. There is well over a foot of snow and it's gorgeous. We had the coldest week in the history of weather (which apparently has been around for quite some time) and I'm just glad to emerge with all of my appendages. Luckily, Will stayed in for the entire week, although I did make him help me briefly with the shoveling. It builds character, son! Here is an image I saved from weather.com from one night this week. Legal disclaimer: After viewing this image, your head may explode:

Now that the temperature is back up to a toasty 22 degrees, my fingers are able to type again and I will share with you some pictures of Buddypants from his trip to Texas over the holidays. Some of you have heard the story if his airplane diaper blowout, which I won't go into here. Suffice it to say that Will picked a most inopportune time to completely clear out his colon. Other than that, however, Will did really well on the plane.

First, it was really special to finally meet our new nephew Asher and to see the boys playing together. On a related note, congratulations to Stephie and Jason for finding out that they too are having a boy!!! Testosterone abounds in the Roop household! Okay, back to business, here are the gals and their boyz:


Granddad was excited to see his grandson for the first time since he was a newborn:


Tired from his big trip:


We went to Austin for a couple of nights, which was awesome. It was special to see everyone, although it was a very short trip. First we hung out with the Kurths, and strangely enough we don't have any pictures of them or their beautiful children, Kaeta and Jonah. My only picture of them involves Derek and a very odd hat - which I won't post without permission. We put Will in their Bumbo and he did pretty well, although his head slowly fell to one side and had to be held up a bit:



Will also loved meeting his Aunt Janet and Uncle Kevin! Will was very smiley with them and also enjoyed getting to join them at our favorite Indian restaurant in Austin:



Will got some great toys from Santa, and his favorite seemed to be this one, which he likes to grab onto and pull up to his mouth for exploration:


Baby Asher got one too:


Lately we've enjoyed seeing a lot of "firsts" from William. He now loves grabbing his feet, and tries desperately to get his toes into his mouth. He's so close! Sometimes we help him out and that makes him very happy. He also started eating some rice cereal on our trip, and he is very confused by it:


We have many more pictures of our trip, but I want to keep this post reasonable. We had such a wonderful time with friends and family and we really miss and love you all. Hopefully we can see you all again very soon. I will leave you with some pictures from this morning. Will seems to prefer this toy lately. He turns on his side to look at it, then grabs it, rolls back onto his back, then pulls it up to his face and rubs his face with it or puts the wings in his mouth:




Much love to you all.
-J