Christmas Town

The womenfolk traveled up to Leavenworth, WA over the weekend to experience the "Little Bavaria" of the NW. About a 5 hour drive that became almost 8 with the help of a snowstorm on the mountain pass. The icy windshield and loooong drive was worth it once we found ourselves pulling the girls on sleds through the town - with about 18 inches of recently fallen snow, Christmas lights everywhere, carolers in the town gazebo and people milling around the main street it was pretty darn festive.


Main street in Leavenworth

The girls gave us a good five minutes between the time we got all their gear on and when they started complaining about "too much!" "too hot!" "mittens!!!".

Sledding into town. Target sleds = priceless.

Getting in the spirit

 

"Oh Mama, this is booootiful! It's soooo cute!!!". Same reaction to each and every ornament as she hangs them carefully, all in the same 6 inches of space on the tree.

Halloween

As she proved last year, Ellery is a Halloween natural. She led the way to each house, and was not shy about banging on the door and holding out her bag. She, Ruby & Myla made quite the threesome marching down the street.

Fall fun

I am trying to get Ellery's training started in the kitchen- so far she is passable at whisking, great at dumping pre-measured ingredients more or less into the bowl, and excellent at knife skills (ha). For those times that I actually would like to bake something all the way through to completion I set her up with the practice kitchen:

Scott is putting in an amazing patio by hand, thanks to skills learned from summers with Andrew. Ellery "helps" out there too, gathering rotten apples from the ground and spreading sand between the stones.

And of course playing horsey, a game learned this summer in Cortes.

Helping in the yard

Sauvie Island

An afternoon at Sauvie Island

Canada!

More to come from our trip to Cortes Island....

Newport BeachTrip

, /;l

party for christine and marcus

NC VISIT 2010

Wrightsville Beach with grandparents




New Friends

Peony farm

Happy Mother's Day!

2 minutes on the couch

Happy To You Daddy!

"Happy To You! Happy To You!!" Recently Ellery managed to add "Birthday" into that sentence, but it's much funnier the original way. Not to veer too far from the topic of this online journal, but below are 2 videos from Scott's 40th birthday.

First video is Scott coming in to his surprise birthday...


And this video unfortunately does not show Ellery's face falling when she realizes that "Happy Birthday" is being sung to Scott and not her. However you can hear the smoke alarm in the background, which went off when we lit all 40 candles.

New Play Set

Putting together new play set in Aunt Lubelle's yard

Easter

let the hunt begin!

Never what?

We learned a new lesson recently - you may have to speak Ellerese to understand what she is saying, but here's a hint: the lesson involved keeping our hands away from gifts Lucia leaves in the yard...

Monkey pjs

They are fleece. They have monkeys. What could be better?