Happy St. Nicholas Day!

Did you know that December 6th is St. Nicholas day? If you leave out your shoes the night before, and if you've been very good, St. Nicholas will come and leave a surprise in your shoes.  This year St. Nicholas brought Esther two Christmas books, for Chris he brought peppermint syrup so we can re-create the Starbucks peppermint hot coco.  For me, a real treat, St. Nicholas brought Trader Joe's Sea Salt Caramels. I LOVE Christmas!

We had a fun breakfast of German-Apple Pancakes with yogurt and berries, listened to Christmas music, and felt very much in the Christmas spirit. Esther is still not sure what's going on, but that's okay.  Better too young than to old for these sorts of things.

Here is our   Advent wreath  and the pretty and thankfully non-fragile nativity from Chris' parents last year.  Still no tree this year, but we are slowly building up our repertoire of Christmas decor and traditions.  A new one that we started this year was reading A Christmas Carol because we figure if President Monson can take time to read it every year, so can we.  Chris or I reads a chapter or two out loud every night and we just finished last night. I'm excited to start another book  tonight.  Not sure what we'll read next, but I'm thinking perhaps it will be The Other Wise Man. 

We can only put decorations in very high-out of reach  due to a certain almost two year old wild woman who lives here.  Bless her. 

Thanks to Sarah and Jake (Chris and Amber's cousins who live in Kirkland) for having us over last week for a gingerbread house party with real gingerbread.  Esther learned the word "candy" and how to eat most of her decorations long before they made it on the house.  We had a lovely time!

Merry Christmas to all!

Thanksgiving in Winthrop

We spent Thanksgiving with my sister Cynthia and her family who live in Winthrop.  Having a sister just 4 hours away is a major bonus to living in Washington.  Especially when that sister has a daughter just 2 weeks older than Esther, and she lives in a place with this view of the Cascades from her family room.  Can we say gorgeous?  I was literally inside the house when I took these pictures of the deer that came up for a morning snack. 

 Harriet and Esther played amazingly well together, mostly playing with the light switches, jumping, calling each other's names "Esser!" and "Harri-eh!" or just yelling, and playing with the toy animals.  Harriet is quite the little firecracker and it was delightful getting to know her fun personality.  She is going to be a great friend.

 A neighbor brought over a refrigerator box for the kids to play with. As you can kind of see, much creativity ensued that involved lots of paint and eating various meals inside the box, passed via a small hole in the roof.  All five kids somehow managed to fit inside along with various furniture and toys.  So fun.

The Feast:

Emil, Joshua, Marta, Thomasin

Cynthia & Thomasin

 Esther snuggling up to Marta one morning.  We spent a lot of time by that fire, because it was quite cold up there, and on our last morning we woke up to...

 SNOW!

 We drove up the pass to where the road was closed.  The oldest 3 kids (Thomasin, Marta, and Emil) put on their cross country skis and the rest of us trudged along the road next to a creek.  It was absolutely lovely...but Esther, being the Carolina girl that she is, wasn't such a fan of the cold.

And that is about what the road looked like when we were driving home!