New Year's with the Walkers

With this scheduled to be the off year for Christmas, the Walker Clan decided to do a New Year's get together and spend 2-3 days right at New Year's together. To kick it off, we started with the Juniper's baby blessing with Matt and Brooklyn in American Fork. It is so cute to see both Lucy and Juniper right together. Lucy is bigger, but they have so many Walker features in them, it is cute.

We took the chance to grab a family picture.

Then we went up to Morgan with everyone a couple days before New Year's. We had such a great time. Shantel and I really enjoy spending time with her family and it is so nice to be together. Jenna and Kevin could not make it, but everyone else was there. We planned to play games as much as we could. We loved that and also just sitting around talking to everyone.

Matt with the two babies.

This picture is so cute, Caleb literally fell asleep in his chair, it was only like 6:30.

The next morning, the kids were so excited for kids pancakes with Grandpa. It is one of their favorite things at the Walker house. It was also fun because we had Brooklyn there who is a real artist. Everyone took turns making fun pancakes. (Not sure if this is covered before, but they are called kid pancakes because Grandpa Walker draws kids with the pancake batter). Austin and Caleb were so excited to help Grandpa make the batter, get everything ready and then make there own pancakes.

We took a lot of pictures with Lucy and Juniper together.

This is a game called Carcassonne. We loved it. We played it basically as much as we could all day. There were a bunch of different expansion packs, so we kept playing with different packs and had so much fun. I love playing games with this group.

That night we were also really excited to play "Dungeons and Dragons." Everyone did prep work the week before to get their characters ready. Matt acted as Dungeon Master. Shantel's character was a Gnome named Elodie Fennsdaughter. She is known as the scourge of the Giants. Meanwhile, I was a half elf that loved to play music and was named Finnoty, "Finn" for short. Elodie and I met a while back and now were joining this crew for an adventure. We had so much fun with the role play and really enjoyed it. Shantel and I have never done anything like this at all, but had so much fun.

We welcomed in the New Year with Sparkling Cider and watching the ball drop.

The next day we had the Walker Cup competition. We started with cookie decorating.

Here are all of the competitors.

And the cookies. They look so good.

Shantel did this amazing Snowglobe and I did this Christmas tree. Shantel's cookie was clearly the best. We also thought the other cookies were so incredible it was hard to pick a favorite. We voted and the combined points led to your team score.

We also did Karoke later on and the kids loved it so much! They had never done it before, but thought it was so fun.

Shantel reading the kids books before bed.

We finished the walker cup with a few more games which included Carcassone and Melissa and Blake took home the title for the 2nd straight year! Congrats to them.

Meanwhile the kids fund a love the next morning for the foosball table.

We gather all our things together and look, we practically brought our whole house.

We had so much fun with the Walker's and such a great New Year's party. We love them very much and were glad to think about what a great year we had!