Gosh, I'm just not sure where to even begin.. It is officially the start of a new year, and the completion of an absolutely wonderful holiday season at our house. We spent a ton of time in our jammies at home which was fantastic and relaxing, and it was so nice to have Hunt around for such an extended period of time without having school work to do. HG got to be home from daycare with him for almost three weeks, and they had a great trip back to NoVa to see his parents which sounded like a really special visit for all of them. We decorated some cookies, and enjoyed playing with Harper's new playroom toys and really just laid low. I feel like we all came away from the last few weeks with some good family bonding time and nice memories to go into the new year with.
Christmas Cookie Decorating (and sampling..)
Christmas Eve dinner with the Ross's
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| Harper participating in the "cheers" with her sippy |
Christmas Eve playroom preparation.. we decided to just bring everything upstairs and leave it all unwrapped for her to see at once. I was really happy to see it all come together after so many weeks of picking things out and wondering how it would all work together. Daddy had the pleasure of the 3+ hours of kitchen construction (Mommy warned him it was going to be a bear!).
Christmas Day.. the kitchen, as expected, was the clear winner for excitement and time spent with playing but she seemed really excited by all and keeps asking "to go to the playroom" so I know she is into playing there now which is really fun.
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| I just adore this pic.. The matching shirts and bejewels just sort of happened naturally |
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| Happy happy little HG |
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| Taking a breather from all the fun |
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| The aftermath of a few hours up there |
Christmas at the Zoo.. we had a rare highly tolerable day of almost 50 degrees and sun, so we decided that it was a good one to get all of us out of the house. Harper is obsessed with "Let's Go To the Zoo" and we read it multiple times per day, so Hunt really wanted to get her to the zoo. We headed down there, only to find that we were an hour before it actually opened- grrrrr- but rather than bail, we ran over to the Children's museum for a few carousel rides to kill time and then actually drove back to the zoo. I was a little skeptical about how long we would make it, but since HG had spent several nap times recently without ever sleeping in her crib, we figured it was worth a shot. As it turned out, she was awesome and we made it late enough to explore several new areas and to ride the train which was super fun!
New Years Eve... Hunt's mom came up for a little visit and was kind enough to babysit so that we could go out to dinner. We had a nice, low key dinner at Trader's Point restaurant and great wrap-up to what was quite a year! I'm so glad that I have started the blog this year to keep up with all of our happenings.. I couldn't even begin to summarize it all, except that I know we were super busy and HG grew and changed SO much! It's looking like 2014 is going to be even busier with more work travel (aka schedule stress), but a lot of fun family activities and getting ready for Carson's wedding, so here we go!
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| Neither of us have a full smile here, although we were actually both happy and in a good mood! I like that you can see one of my fur vests.. part of my burgeoning collection of them for winter staples, as well as some of my new Jcrew statement pieces. And the red lips.. my new MAC "Red" which is quite popular with the fashion bloggers this winter :-) |
