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Christmas...Eve and Morning

A trip to the National Zoo on Christmas Eve.


Amelia loved playing the part of the angel in our nativity play. She especially loved finding gifts to bring to the baby Jesus.


Delicious chocolate fondue.


Amelia was quite satisfied with her Christmas morning surprise from Santa.


The Christmas morning mess.


It's safe to say Amelia was happy with her new princess dress.




All tuckered out.


A trip to Hershey, PA (and Chocolate World!)


Delicious!

Merry Christmas

Christmas in Washington

Friday night we headed downtown to see the National Christmas Tree and all of the small trees representing each state. And the giant yule log. Saturday we headed back downtown to check out the amazing train sets at the National Botanic Gardens. They also had these incredible replicas of many of the buildings in D.C., all made out of natural materials like leaves and twigs. Spectacular. Not to mention that it was beautiful inside with all the foliage and countless poinsettias. Then we headed over to the National Gallery of Art to check out the Edward Hopper exhibit. Then we made a stop at the National Museum of the American Indian to indulge in some fry bread and Mexican hot chocolate.

Is that edible?

Amelia ate an ornament off the Christmas tree the other day. She actually took a bite and starting crunching away. It was an awful sound. Ornament glass crunching in her teeth. We did our best to rinse her mouth (after a moment of Ben freaking out that her whole mouth was bleeding...turns out it was just a red ornament). There were tiny fragments everywhere. We do offer her real food. But it doesn't look so shiny and delicious I guess.

Temple Lights

Jeff, Rachel, and Anna came up from Richmond for a quick visit this past weekend. We'll miss those visits when they move to Denver. Amelia loves seeing cousin Anna. We drove to the D.C. Temple to check out the lights and the semi-live Nativity.

Is that wrong?

Christmas Festivities

We had the Webbs over the other night to do some Christmas cookie decorating. Amelia decided to decorate her face instead.








Amelia after we got home from a late-night Christmas party last night.

Jefferson Airplane

We finished the last of our Christmas shopping and wanted to get out of the house today and head somewhere that didn't involve waiting in line. (By the way, to all the mall kiosk workers, no, I don't want you to rub that lotion on my hands or spritz that perfume in my face or try that hair extension on my head or tell me that you have the perfect gift for my mother. I just want to walk through the mall in relative peace.) End rant.

So we headed downtown and stopped at one of our favorite little spots, Gravelly Point, to watch the airplanes land at Reagan National.

Then I told Amelia we were going to a park, and tried to convince her that the Jefferson Memorial is sort of a park. She kept asking me who "jefferman" is. She had fun climbing up all the steps and picking berries off the ground (we even saw a marriage proposal take place) but when we left, she asked me where the park was. I guess she can't be fooled.

What's that called again?

Amelia and I were having breakfast together the other day and she, well, she passed gas. She looked up at me and thought for a minute, and then said "I burped my poop, mamma".

400th Anniversary

Ben finally had a few days off after a crazy few weeks at work, so we headed down to Williamsburg to visit our wonderful friends the Dyckmans. It was fun to see Amelia getting into trouble with Ethan again. Ben and I got to stroll around Colonial Williamsburg at night and enjoy the beautiful candlelit buildings and frigid temperatures. We warmed up in a lovely cafe with some European drinking chocolate which was fabulous. The next day we toured Jamestown, which is celebrating it's 400th anniversary this year. We just squeezed that one in. Despite the cold, it was really fun and Ethan and Amelia had fun chasing each other through the Indian huts and asking what all the dead animal furs were. I have definitely learned a lot more about American history since we've lived here in Virginia.










Relaxing in animal furs.


Amelia tries on some armor.

The Christmas tree

We ventured out the other day to select our Christmas tree from our usual exotic tree farm (the Home Depot). Amelia enjoyed running around the tree lot, but she enjoyed playing on the rocking horses in the store even more.

Foreign Object

Ben was changing light bulbs in our attic when suddenly there was this huge explosion and all the power went out. It took me awhile to realize that Ben was not the cause of this. We looked outside and saw several of our neighbors emerge from their homes (neighbors we didn't even know existed) looking confused. The power was out all around us too. Ben called the power company and got an automated message which said "if you heard a loud explosion, press 2" so he did. Moments later, 3 fire trucks and an ambulance arrived on our street and blocked it off. A dozen fireman wandered around checking things out. One went into our house to check out a suspicious smell.

We soon found the culprit...

A squirrel had shorted out the transformer, and in the process, fried himself.

Several hours later, I received an automated message on my phone from the power company: "the power outage at your residence, due to a foreign object in the line, has been resolved."