Shannon Phillips

Photo by Sam!

How lovely are thy branches!

Another mom at the co-op took this picture of Davy decorating sugar cookies today. Look how big my little guy is!

Photo by Gail Murphy!

I found the flightsuits on Amazon, and bought the patches, stickers, and old toy “neutron throwers” separately. So this year’s costumes are not exactly storebought and not quite home-made…more like home-assembled. The kids are delighted, anyway.

Sol is nominally Slimer but I didn’t make a costume for him. He’s too young to feel left out!

Bubbles were blown! Babies were bounced! Nonna made an incredible array of delicious foods and we all chowed down! At one point I passed Sol to somebody friendly-looking and didn’t get him back for two hours, which is the hallmark of a well-functioning extended family gathering if you ask me.

Bonus pictures: vampire baby! You can see his first teeth coming in.

And here he is just making a funny baby face:

Davy started a new year at Peter Pan today:

That photo looks Instagrammed but it’s actually just blurry because neither Sam nor myself remembered to bring along a proper camera, and so Sam snapped one with his phone.

If you’re not intimately familiar with the franchise, Robin is here cosplaying as “Dark Moon” Luigi, sporting the Poltergust 5000 ghost-hunting equipment (i.e. a backpack and a broom).

Davy is just Mario and very happy to have a role in his older brother’s fantasy play. (Everyone in the family has in fact been cast: I’m Princess Peach, while Sam is Bowser, and Sol is a mushroom man.) The hats were a present from Pops and Mo—they arrived yesterday in the mail and the kids just about flipped their lids!