Winter Fun

Here are some pictures of things we have been up to lately:

Making holiday treats (with lots and lots of sprinkles). Each Christmas Eve we bake cookies and bring them to our local fire station. The firefighters always let the kids check out the fire engines, which they love:

Having a surprise visit from Santa. Samuel asked to try on Santa's hat and Santa replied "Well, only if I can wear your hat!" 

We went to see The Nutcracker (disclaimer: it was the Max and Ruby version of The Nutcracker, designed for young kids, so it wasn't the real thing, but more of an introduction to what The Nutcracker is like.) You can only barely make it out in the picture below, but Becca insisted on packing a gift bag full of ribbon and wrapping paper scraps and bringing them with us to give to "a stranger at the nutcracker", as she said. (should I be concerned that she wants to give presents to strangers?) We gave it to one of the ushers who looked like a grandmother, and she was very nice about it. The performance was at a beautiful restored theater called The Embassy Theatre. You can kind of see some of it in the picture below (if you look past the part where it looks like Erin's head is on fire. Ushers are apparently good at accepting gift bags of ribbon, but not so good at taking pictures.)

Becca has been asking to try ice skating, so we went one afternoon with Aunt Erin and Uncle Mark to a local rink that has ice skating and also happens to have bounce houses. Both kids overwhelmingly preferred the bounce houses to the ice skating, and as you can see in the picture below, Samuel is not eager to get back on the ice any time soon. His feet kept hurting because instead of gliding them across the ice, he kept picking them up and taking tiny steps. Becca was a wild woman on the ice and it took me AND Erin to hold her up so that none of us fell. After about 2 times around the rink, she told us "I'm ready to go in the middle now. On my own." Um, I don't think so. She was so excited and wiggly, she could barely stand still on the ice without falling one way or the other. 

Happy New Year everyone! I will try to be better about posting on our blog in 2014!