Dawn of Ro Ro /Advent of Rotay Hopper

This small deaf dog came out of nowhere to be the fifth sister!

Don't worry, the pigs are fine!  Here's Ida at 4-H:

RoRo spends a lot of time at college:

And is very fast...

sweet breath, too

The 2017

Aunt Sally!  What have we been doing?  Got so ensnarled.  Let's see...

Maggie, wearing a very strange wig, picked us up at the airport...

January:  lots of baking:

Drove through some treacherous snowy roads (mini-van!) to go to Black Butte and a skiing adventure:

Snowboarder Ida shredded on this trip:

Skiier Miki tore it up:

Somewhere in there it as Ella's 29th!

Oh then in February we went on another ski trip, to Mount Hood!

 Miki really found the Powder on this trip!

Some crucial insights from Ida's notebooks:

Aunt Jen sent a lot of gross candy for Valentine's Day!

Holidays and Beyond

More!  We made it to Haddonfield, home of the Vining Grandparents, who very assiduously avoided being photographed on this trip:

We did however see Great Uncle Joe and Great Aunt Alice!  Excellent.

And then we went up north to CT to battle Uncle Dan and his minions in a variety of games!

They gave Ida a Gryffindor scarf!  Score.

DHV on the game of Life.  Won, strangely, by DKV.  I chose not to go to college.

Very hard to see that the girls went and did some high-level ropes course and flew around up above us on ziplines:

Always a fan of the wallpaper in Maggie's room:

 Whoa!  Fast hands!

New earrings...   Pearls from the ocean!

Brutal long travel day to return . . .



... into Aunt Maggie's ever-loving arms.

December!

Must account for some of this crazed action!  Miki played a LOT of Futsal in December, sometimes two games per weekend.  We never played on Sunday, back in Utah...

Had some pretty weak snow, but some serious snow days.  Even got to do some dog-sitting.  That's Frankie, watching the girls build an igloo:

Sometimes we had to trek through the icy snow to get some hot chocolate and maple bars...

I tried to drink a lot of wine this holiday season.

Draco Malfoy:

Glissa, hanging in there:

Yes!  Ella did it!  She fully made the Lillian Rock prune coffee cake!

We had to celebrate Christmas on the 24th, due to travel (see below), but the girls were up early and quite eager:

(Travel)

December!

Okay, still November; who knows what happened in December? Stay tuned. Meanwhile, nothing says Thanksgiving like Jim & Grambee coming to town. Hot times at Gino's...

A very patient young lady.

Shortly after Thanksgiving we set out to procure our tree and holiday card photo.  So hard.  Fortunately, Harry Potter helped us out.

Hmm...

We decided to crop ourselves out of this one and that was that:

Kind of wanted to use this one, because of Jim.