New year...

Christmas is always such a crazy time, and then it just keeps going as we have Riley's birthday (planning, inviting, baking, cleaning, decorating) and then the annual Davidson/Aylard hockey game, a massive Davidson dinner and then New Year's activities.
Riley had a great birthday. We planned it for lunch time with all our family that was in town. We had both sets of grandparents and all the cousins except for 3 that were sick and had to miss out :( We might do another friend party in the next few weeks, but we'll see how that works out!
Riley is looking a lot older...filling out and getting taller. He put on 10 pounds this year! He is still always up for adventure and gets into trouble when he's bored. He's been cross country skiing a few times with his cousins but still hasn't made it up to snowboard yet. He's been enjoying hockey in the daytime hockey league that he just joined this year. He's one of the youngest, so struggles to keep up, but has improved greatly. We run grab him out of school at 1pm once a week, and Riley, Shea and I are at the rink for the next 2 hours which is enough for me! I don't know how true hockey moms do it a few times a week! This past year wasn't the best for Riley and he went through a huge shift of friends and seems kind of lost in a lot of ways, so we're praying that this year is much better for him!
I have been knitting over the holidays... made a bigger bear hat for Hugo, some legwarmers for my niece and started a pair of mitts. I need to branch out and make an actual sweater, but I tend to appreciate smaller projects so we'll see if that happens!

Today I got to play more with my new lens. It is quite tricky! One of the hard parts is that you have to go completely manual, and when I'm shooting indoors with no flash, it can be pretty tricky to get anything in focus. This one I'm proud of, as you can see the middle is in focus but the rest is a twisted blur...I will have to take it outside sometime.

So the tree is down and those pesky needles are vacuumed away. The sister and sister-in-law have left town and school starts tomorrow. I guess I'd better get thinking about laundry and packing lunches again!!