The kids have been dying for some good pictures of Abby, so here you go:

Dan Meyer, one of the premier sword swallowers in the world, was at Vanderbilt doing a television shoot and I got to bring the kids along to see him do his stuff. They had been so excited about this for the past month, I’m so glad the snowfall we had this weekend didn’t force us to cancel all this.

Here they are patiently waiting for everyone to arrive. Things got delayed by a couple of hours, but they were so good that whole time:

Catherine, the show’s producer, shows off some of Dan’s swords:

Dr. Mashburn, Dan’s physician, was in the show with me:

Here’s Dan enjoying some pizza before all the fun starts:

Daniel, the host of the show, chills out during a brief period of no filming:

I couldn’t take any pictures during the actual sword swallowing because I had to operate the imaging equipment, but we’ll be able to see it all when the show airs (in about 12 months).

By some reports we had up to 6 inches of snow since yesterday afternoon. It’s certainly the biggest snowfall we’ve had in years, and probably the best one ever to occur on a day when I don’t have to go to work. We did a ton of sledding today. It was really great. We spent most of the time on the big hill at Chenoweth, but here are some pictures I was able to get when we were sledding in our front yard:

We went to Crockett Park to play outside some today. The kids had a great time exercising and even got Daddy to do a few things despite his shoulder.

The kids wanted to have some pictures with Monkey Grandma, and they wanted to show off some of their Christmas presents.

The girls put on a dance show using their new keyboard. Grandma seemed to enjoy it, but Jake got a little burned out on it and wanted to go elsewhere and read.

Here are some shots of the kids on their bikes today:

We hadn’t been to the zoo in a long time, and it was a beautiful day outside, so the kids really wanted to go. I took way too many pictures. Here are a bunch of them:

Some pictures of the kids opening presents this fine Christmas morning:

The reality is that there won’t be Christmas cards coming in the mail this year, so this will have to do. I feel pretty bad about this, since I’ve put together a picture to mail out every year since Lauren was born. Anyway, here they are all dressed up fancy for their annual picture.