Picture dump!

Here's some Christmas pictures. Our day has been absolutely wonderful so far. Relaxing, weather is perfect, company is wonderful, kids are happy. I love Christmastime. As I type this Trevor is laying on the couch reading "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" from his Grandma, Rachael is listening to High School Musical 3 (I think) on her new HK boom box and Ariel is going low tech with the bubble wrap. If it's not felt, or a spatula.. it's bubble wrap. We enjoyed homemade cinnamon rolls, breakfast casserole and mimosas (and later I drank the rest of the Champagne!) for breakfast. Currently we have the turkey smoking for dinner and will eat sausage/cranberry stuffing, glazed carrots, mashed potatoes and gravy for dinner. The stuffing is in the oven and smells soooo good. I'm hungry! More pictures of dinner will come later. As well as video of Trevor riding his skateboard and the kitty and random pics on Ray and Pam's camera. MERRY CHRISTMAS!


The tree before the kids came downstairs. All set up for Christmas! Ariel is the far left, Rachael is the middle and Trevor is the right.


We called the photo "Get the heck outta the way Grandpa!" heehee. The kids coming downstairs to check out the tree. Trevor woke up at 4am. OMG. I heard him and Rachael heading downstairs and caught them and said "Um, no. It's too early! Open your stockings and wake us up at 6am to go downstairs!" Thankfully, they were reasonably happy to do that.


Trevor posing on his new skateboard!!!! He was THRILLED. It's a way cool board and he has been out on it a couple times.


Ariel with this insane cat she wanted. It meows and purrs and moves its head and blinks its eyes. It's creepy but cute.


Rachael's new robe. The girls loved their jams and HK robes. Ariel ran upstairs and put her jammies and robe on right away. heehee. Ray and Pam have pics of her in her jams.


Her grandma B gave Rachael is enormous Barbie bus that was also a hottub. It is truly insanely huge! And lots of fun. Inside is a pretty Mariposa (I think) Barbie that her Auntie Kristen sent (I think?!) and also "cooking show" Barbie from Santa.


Trevor building with his Erector set from Santa.


Trevor and Ray building- they are working on the helicopter.


Rachael zonked out on the couch for an hour or so after breakfast and then running around outside.


The rigged thing Ray put over the smoker so the turkey would hold a steady temperature. We smoke our turkey every year. Yum.

Sick Rachael, tired mom

So I will give you some pictures. We put our tree up this weekend. We have a glorious, prelit fake tree. I was always againts having a fake tree until we bought one. It is *so* easy to put up. And prelit is like, omg, THE BEST. We bring out the three big tree segments, click them together, the branches fall open and I kind of spread out the pieces of pine "twigs" so it looks less smushed and more tree like. Then the kids come in and we ooh and ahh over the ornaments. It never fails.. EVERY year I think we have no ornaments and I wonder what we will put on our tree. And every year I realize we have TONS of ornaments, plenty for the tree. Over ten years you would have thought we had collected lots of xmas ornaments, but alas, in our move from CA back to the VA area, our box or ornaments got lost. So we had all these really pretty ornaments that we never saw again. Oh well, now we have more.. plus the wonderful addition of handmade ones from the kids.


I keep forgetting that blogger is posting my pictures backwards. Here's the finished tree. I think Ariel took this picture. I took off that vine thing hanging on it.


Trevor, Rachael and Ariel hanging a few ornaments on the other side of the tree.


The stockings were hung by the worm farm with care....


Trevor can make the weirdest faces for a picture. he's hanging an ornament. Notice Chaos in the background, chillin in his Santa hat.


The kids found their hats from last year. Notice Ariel's favorite pumpkin shirt to go along with her reindeer antlers. I think her expression is kind of priceless, too.


Rachael has been sick today. Some kind of stomach bug. She isn't running a fever, but has been throwing up all day and can't hold down anything. This was how she spent her morning, on our bed with Stripey making sure she was ok.


Strip Stripe has grown a lot since I think I last posted pictures. He still has his kitten teeth, but the kitten crazies are mostly over. He still plays with his tail and does somersaults on our bed in the morning. And he climbs up my leg when he wants attention; but he also spends lots of time sleeping. He plays with Chaos and Shadow, too and LOVES that cat tree.


Chaos looking quite festive and full of Christmas cheer. heh.

Humiliating my cats.

These are bad iphone pics, but I have to post pictures of my poor cats.

Yes, I have three kids. But my cats are also my OTHER three kids. They really are spoiled and very much a part of our family.


Ariel putting a puzzle together. Ariel and I seem to find plenty to occupy us during the day, even with the colder weather.


My cats are HORRIFIED by the cold weather. During the summer they spend their days trying to escape the house and be FREE!!! But during the winter they are so disappointed to run outside and have it be so cold. They usually turn and run right back in. And proceed to spend the day following us from room to room like dogs. Shadow normally crawls into my lap at every opportunity. He's not in my lap in this pic because I have probably not let him crawl into it so I could help Ariel with her puzzle.


And then, we humiliated them. Ariel and I had to stop at Petsmart to get the kitties their food. I ended up buying them some hats because they were on sale. Poor Shadow got the reindeer hat. He hated it and quickly pawed it off.


Chaos, because he is so big and, well, round, got to be Santa. The hat barely fit him. And he totally didn't care it was on. He wandered around for a good 15 minutes with it before it just fell off. I think he looks rather endearing as Santa.

Other than that, nothing much has been happening!

Thanksgiving...

We had a great Thanksgiving day, engaging in many fun activities such as the bean bag toss (including chucking them at eachother), football, geocaching and, of course, eating. OK. Here's pictures:


Brett keeping Trevor away from the football.


Dad and Trevor practicing their mad karate skillz.


Ray carrying Rachael AND Ariel and catching the football. Yes, he did all that.


Dad doing his touch down dance. heh.


Mom, Rachael and Ariel chilling after spinning in circles.


A cache! A cache! Geocaching in NC. We found a couple caches.


On our way home from geocaching. I like how Rachael and Claire have the same facial expression. Maybe Rachael was a dog in a former life. heh


My dad got this nifty belt that has a bottle opener on it. It looks a little, um, odd opening beers from your belt buckle. But hey, it works!


My mom gnawing on a turkey neck. The camera died right after this picture so I have no pictures of the actual dinner.


But the dinner was so good that it made Brett pass out afterwards.


Then Kristen and I cleaned the kitchen up, but dad came in and did a couple things. It really wore him out. ;)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

We found that cache!

I posted this morning how we missed that cache yesterday and had to leave it. Well, after I picked the kids up from school this afternoon, we went straight out to find it. This time, we parked in the correct spot and found the cache pretty quickly.


Who's ready to look for that cache? Who? You?


I don't know what's up with the look on Trevor's face. But here's the cache!!!!! It was under a different tree than we were looking around the first time.


Trading out trinkets. It's most fun for the kids to find a cache that has stuff for trade in it. There are lots of microcaches in our area. A microcache is tiny and has room for just the log to record your name. But the bigger caches are tupperware container sized and have room to trade trinkets. The kids put in a little plastic dragon and two small horses and took a little giraffe and two army guys.


The cache is hidden under this tree. Do you see it? :)


Then I came home to this wonderful arrangement from Edible Arrangements!!! It was for my birthday from Pam and Ray. Thank you so much guys! It's super tasty!

Cookies!

Yesterday we baked gingerbread men. Well, first Ariel and I made the cookie dough. Then we put it in the fridge to chill until we got home with Trevor and Rachael to decorate the little cookie guys. But first... before we decorated cookie men, we did a little geocaching.

For my birthday Ray got me a Garmin handheld GPS unit. I know, a little geeky but I was so excited! I have been wanting to geocache with the kids for a while now. So today I loaded my first geocache onto the unit and, after I picked up Trevor from school, we tried our first geocache without Ray or our geocaching friends- Bill and Christianne. Rachael had Creative Kids, an afterschool "acting" program so we had until 2pm (45 minutes) until we picked her up. The cache was .6 miles away, so I figured we'd drive because I figured Ariel wouldn't be able to walk that far. So we found a spot near the cache in a townhome complex parking lot. The cache, we quickly discovered, was on the OTHER side of the golf course, requiring that we trek back up and around the course. Then it was not only on the other side, but all the way at the other end from where we were parked. Argh. So, hot on the trail, we made it all the way to the cache and were right on top of it. "What time is it?" I inquired to Trevor, who had the watch. "It's, um, close to 2pm," he replied. ACK! We not only were somewhere in some other townhome neighbourhood that looked like every neighbourhood around here, we were at the other end of the golf course and we hadn't found the cache. We spent five minutes frantically searching the undergrowth and couldn't find our treasure. So reluctantly, we had to abandon the search and turn for the trek back to the car. But, hm.. where was the car? I KNEW there was a shorter way back that we had walked. We had ten minutes and it would take us about 15 just to walk back the way we had come. I started to carry Ariel and set off on what I hoped was a shortcut. But it was 50 degrees, we were wearing coats and Ariel was HEAVY and kept sliding down my coat. "Ari, you have to RUN!" and I set her down and we jetted for the car. I have to hand it to my little 3.5 year old- she ran all the way back to the car. And I have to hand it to me- I did find the shortcut and we were back to the car in half the time it took us to get out to the cache. And, thankfully, Trevor's watch was a tiny bit fast. So I ended up only being one minute late to pick up Rachael. Needless to say, all the kids and I are going back to the cache today to find it. We were RIGHT there and there is nothing more frustrating than abandoning a search that you have ALMOST found.

Anyways, after that little adventure, we were ready to go home and roll, decorate and bake cookies!

Ariel, Rachael and Trevor decorating. We had M&Ms, Raisinettes, dried cranberries and coconut chips.


One batch of the finished cookies. Man, the recipe made like 40 gingerbread men!


I got The Best of Fine Cooking "Cookies" magazine. I handed it to Trevor to circle some cookies he wanted to bake this season. He handed it back to me and had circled like all the cookies. heh. Then, when I turned to the gingerbread men page, I found the little message on the lower right page: "I love this book!! Momy!" It was really cute.


Here's the video. Just the kids making cookies. Nothing amazing, but I think they are darn cute!

Thanksgiving at school, Native Pride Dancers.

A lot has been going on these last few weeks. I find it difficult to get the Rome pictures posted because they are all on Ray's laptop. I will get those up as I can. For now, though, life has been happening.

Wednesday I let the kids miss a day of school so we could go into DC to see the Native Pride Dancers. I am still a member of my local homeschool group and a mom on there had bought a block of group tickets. It was 5 dollars a person for us to go. Too good of a deal to pass up, so we got tickets. Never let school interfere with your education, eh? Unfortunately, I couldn't take pictures of the people actually dancing. They were amazing. They were a group of Native Americans who travelled around demonstrating native dances and costumes. They talked a little about their beliefs and culture, did some really fun dancing, drumming and chanting. We thoroughly enjoyed the show. I have a couple pictures of before the show:


Eating at the insanely expensive cafe in the Kennedy Center. If I have been to the KC, it's been years. There were no prices on anything in the cafe! The lunch was fabulous, though.


Some flags hanging in the hallway.


My kids being kids. You can take the kids to the theatre, but you can't make them act like mini adults. heh. I realize I should have dressed them up more.


Zonked out in the car on the way home. Man, they sure passed out!

Friday we had the Thanksgiving lunch at school. It's a really cute event. The lunc times get staggered out so there is room for parents to come for lunch. I joined Rachael and Ray joined Trevor for his lunch. All I have are a couple Iphone pics. It was quite good, though! We walk into the cafeteria to find the tables all set for us (with plasticware, but still!). We all sit down and then the teachers and staff wait on all of us, serving us drinks and our cafeteria trays of turkey dinner. We had turkey and stuffing with gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans and pumpkin ice cream for dessert. It was all actually kind of good! It's always fun joining the kids for lunch and it was nice to have other parents to talk to this time, too.


Of course they eat their ice cream first. heh


Both kids enjoyed their lunch. It was a nice change from pizza day, which is normally what they eat one Friday and the one day I let them buy lunch at school (unless I am really pressed for time in the morning).

I also taught Grace Art in Trevor's class this week. We learned about Romare Bearden and then made collages like he did. The kids really got into it, but I sure could have used more time! We had an hour- and 45 minutes of that was working on the collage. Most of them finished and I was really impressed by how well they did. We had talked about how, in a collage, you find different parts to make a whole. So they didn't have to find a person and cut it out- they could find different heads, eyes, legs, etc and glue them all together to make a person. One person did just that, another cut out a big head with an open mouth smile and made it eating a smaller plate of food. Trevor made an building with heads all looking out the window and then some sort of abstract head pile on the ground. lol. It was a fun project that we all enjoyed. Definitely a mess to clean up!

In other random news, I have signed up for classes starting in January. I will be going back fulltime- taking French, Bio, an elective which I suspect is gym (?) and American Lit 1. I'm looking forward to doing school work again. We're also working out the timeline for buying and moving into our house, hopefully before xmas. Other random things happen weekly and we are really looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with my parents in NC, seeing the lights in Tanglewood and generally just hanging out.

Rome! Part 1

Hopefully I will get a chance to keep updating this. This is our Rome trip, part one. As most know, Ray and I went to Rome for our ten year anniversary. We invited my parents along because 1. We all get along well and 2. It's always more fun to vacation WITH people! Our vacation was WONDERFUL! We had such a relaxing, great time that we didn't want to come home. Since I don't want this post to be 10 pages long, I'll just start in on the pictures, adding comments as necessary.


I have no idea why blogger is uploading my photos in the reverse order. Argh. This is the Vatican at night. We were walking from our hotel to Trevi Fountain. Day one.


This was Ray most of our trip. He took some amazing pictures, many of which aren't going to get posted and blogger doesn't do the photos justice anyway. Maybe they will get posted to his flickr.


Some angels on the roof of a building on our walk to Trevi fountain.


Eating at our first place in Rome. It's the cafe outside our hotel. It was good, but we found much better places to eat later.


My parents hotel room at The Mecenate Palace in Rome. It was a great hotel. We had a smaller room but still really nice.


Enjoying a bottle of wine on the terrace upon our return from Trevi Fountain.


The view of the church from the terrace of our hotel.


mmmmMMMMM.. gelato at Trevi Fountain. Everywhere we went had espresso and gelato. heh.


Detail of Trevi Fountain.


Trevi Fountain. It was packed with tourists and people selling stuff. The people selling stuff (everything from roses to scarves) were really persistant and were all over Rome. We just got used to saying No! a lot.

That was the end of day one. Our flight was great, it was a straight through flight and we upgraded to Economy Plus so we were not so cramped. I didn't want to nap when we got there, but our flight was all night and I was sooo tired when we got to Rome. As soon as we got our room I crashed for a couple hours. Then we woke and met up and headed out to Trevi Fountain.

Highlights of our trip that I will post soon: The Coloseum, The Vatican (even though we never could get in), EATING! The Picaso exhibit at a local museum and various other things.