All Things Post-Christmas

This is obviously late, but we wanted to share some pictures from post-Christmas festivities.

We made it to Zoo lights this year. Getting there before it opened and bringing a picnic dinner was a much better plan than last year's epic traffic-jammed failure.

Adam's birthday was at the aquarium this year:

We christened our new Crock Pot with a beef stew that everyone, including Cora, enjoyed:

Cora decided she needed to get in a bit of exercise after all the excess holiday food:

And the last picture from 2012. Happy New Year!

All Things Christmas

Christmas Eve started out with another car ride back to western Washington. Audrey was simply fascinated with the snow so we took a little pit stop near the top of the pass. Cora even got to join in on the fun.

Christmas Eve dinner was over at Aunt Lala's and Uncle Steve's house. It was a crazy fun evening, but what else can be expected with these four munchkins.

We got home with just enough time to leave some cookies and carrots out and then the girls were off to bed. Santa didn't bring much requiring assembly this year, so the adults were ready for bed by 10:00. Much better than last year!

Christmas morning started at about 7:30. Only a half hour earlier than normal. Santa brought Audrey the one thing she asked for - a real guitar. He found a half-size guitar that is a better fit for her than our guitar and actually plays music (as opposed to the guitar-hero guitar, which is admittedly more "rockin", but not so "real"). Santa was all business with Cora - clothes and books.

Christmas dinner was more time spent together with family. It was hands-off for us as Nana brought delicious homemade meatballs and spaghetti.

Since our dining room table is tiny, we set up a kids table for Audrey and Owen. The dress code was...well, there wasn't a dress code, obviously.

And Cora had her first taste of meatballs. She approved!

Thanks everyone for the great Christmas!

Forward Motion

It's more like the worm than "crawling", but we do have forward motion!

How they play

Audrey and Cora obviously have very different ways to play right now. I hope to see many years of enjoyable play between the two of them but today I just have a funny story to share.

Audrey can be very orderly with her play sometimes. One day before Christmas, she informed me that I was not to disturb anyone in her Little People manger because they were having a party. Indeed, they all looked like they were having a good time.

Unfortunately for Audrey, and her Little People, Cora crashed the party frat boy style while Audrey was napping and puked all over them.

All things Pre-Christmas

The Christmas season started off with the long drive out to pick out and cut down our tree. The weather was great and the tree farm was not busy. Audrey has been into measuring things lately and insisted on measuring each tree as we started walking to see if it would be "big enough" for our living room.

Fortunately, it didn't take too long before we found the perfect tree.

Cora woke up in time for a quick photo-op at the tree farm before we got back in the car to drive home. Hopefully next year she'll get to experience more!

We still have our breakable ornaments placed high out of the reach of little hands but this year we let Audrey help decorate the lower half of the tree. She was more than happy to do so and took her job very seriously.

Of course, other preparations for Christmas involved lots of cookie baking, decorating the house, cookie baking, putting lights up on the house, and more cookie baking.

As we mentioned in another post, we also managed to squeeze in a trip to the Tri-Cities before Christmas. While it was challenging traveling with a little one and three sick individuals (sorry for all the germs that were spread!), we were so happy that we were able to spend time with family. There was lots of relaxing together, meeting some special reindeer, and of course - more baking!

Cora might have picked up a bad habit during the trip. We'll be working on that with her...

January 1st

We have a lot of catching up here on the blog. December just seemed to fly by. But we did manage to catch some cute shots of the girls today and I wanted to get our first of the month photos up on the blog. Hopefully we'll get some Christmas pictures up in the next few days.