The Osborne Family

Since it can be hard to tell when I create a new album or upload some new pics I thought I would write a new post to let you know there are some new pics. I also figured that I could tell you how our Christmases were. Yes that is right I said Christmases. I am pretty sure we had four in total, Bluffton, Curtice, and Oak Harbor, Ohio and St. Joseph, Michigan.

We had our Osborne/Benroth Christmas this year the weekend before Christmas. We all traveled to the Menenite home in Bluffton, Ohio so we could spend Christmas with Grandma Phyllis. We had lots of food, a fun gift exchange, and some heated Bingo. It was good to see everyone and catch up. Afterwards my parents, brother, and sister drove back with Colleen, Ali, and myself to our house. My Dad, brother, and I had plans to watch Avatar in 3D the next day at the Dublin theaters just off of Sawmill. On a side-note, Avatar in 3D is probably the best movie experience of all time. You must see the move in 3D if you still can.

The following Thursday (December 24th) the three of us traveled to my parent’s house in Oak Harbor, Ohio for Christmas where we met up with my brother and Sister. I don’t think there was anyway that we could have stuffed one more item in the Highlander, it was packed full of clothes, baby gear, and gifts. There was no seeing out the back windows, that was for sure. (On a side-note I just ordered a new hitch and a 2′x5′ cargo tray that slides into the hitch for the highlander to give us some extra storage when traveling.) On Christmas morning the seven of us each opened one gift before heading over to Big G’s house in Curtice, Ohio for the Hays/Osborne family Christmas.

Christmas at Big G’s house started off with a good breakfast. We had a lot of people in attendance. I will see if I can name them all continue reading…

2008 seemed to pass by all too quickly. However, this year brought us a little more excitement than years past. We celebrated our first wedding anniversary, Josh celebrated his 30th birthday, our niece Milena turned 1, our good friends Chad and Erin were married, and as you know we celebrated the birth of our daughter Alexandra.

This year we were able to celebrate Christmas and the New Year with our entire family. In early December Colleen and I decided that we needed to take some christmas pictures with Ali. We took a few family pictures with the three of us and then finished up with a few pictures of just Ali. In all we took about 450 pictures. I have posted about 100 of them in this years Christmas gallery. We used a couple of the pictures to create a family Christmas card, we used a couple more as backgrounds for our computers and we also used one or two in a calendar we made for 2009.

We celebrated Christmas this year both in Ohio and in Michigan. In Ohio we celebrated with Grandma and Grandpa Osborne and we also celebrated with Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa Hays and the rest of the Hays family.  In Michigan (at Uncle Mike and Aunt Donna’s house) we celebrated Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa Sullivan, Uncle Mike and Aunt Donna, Ryan and Margie. We had a great time with everyone and Ali had a very nice first Christmas. We have a lot of great pictures and some videos.

While in Michigan we were also able to celebrate the New Year with the Osborne and the Sullivan families which was fun to have everyone together at one time.

Ali has now started to eat rice cereal; however, I would use the term ‘eat’ loosely as she spits out a large portion of each spoonful, leaving us catching the rice in the spoon and attempting to get it back into her mouth. But eventually we manage to get a decent amount in her and down the front of her. If you are interested at all in this process we have a small video of us feeding Ali posted on the Ali Videos page.

We hope your 2008 was great and we wish you a fine 2009.