Well, we are officially all partied out. It was wonderful seeing our families (all of them) and we hope to bring in the New Year by relaxing!  Laney best sums up our mood:

Just belatedly sharing a couple of newborn pictures we took of Laney that I love.  More on Flickr.

The Rose Family has completed 2 out of 4 Christmas parties and are having a great time!  Thanks to our families for hosting us.

Merry Christmas from the Rose Family!

Couldn’t get a good picture of Kaya’s face painted elf before his eyes got smeared, but it was very impressive.

Our local science museum stays open late during December and runs trains to the North Pole to see Santaevery 20 minutes. We didn’t get to go last year, due to a combination of my work schedule and the fact tickets sell like hot cakes. But this year, we had a very successful Santa Train experience!

Our first snow of the season in Durham this morning!  It didn’t stick around, but it was fun for a few minutes.

This time around, I have started missing work pretty quickly after giving birth and am anxious to get back into my hours of research – you know: sitting in my office, drinking tea, cruising pubmed and playing with my statistical software.  I did, however, get to present a poster briefly last week at a urological oncology meeting in Bethesda (picture below).  Laney, however, is clearly not ready for me to go back to work, as evidenced by the constant nursing and crying that appeared around the 3 week mark.  So, instead I spend all day on the couch jiggling and feeding a newborn.

We went to the annual lighting of the Lucky Strike tower at the American Tobacco Campus this weekend.  The weather was nice and we got to hear a few local school choirs.  Kaya met Stormy from the hurricanes and somehow knows the words to Jingle Bells already.