Holiday Rewind

We stayed close to home for the holidays this year, enjoying lots of good time with family and frineds. Here are a few of the highlights from our holiday season:

The family, at the annual holiday brunch with the Macnab family, hosted by Pam and Dick Breckenridge.

A rare beautiful day in December, playing in the grass with the Macnab kids and grandkids.

A Christmas eve outing downtown for a ride on the Christmas carousel!

Our group of friends continued a great tradition of joining together to sponsor a family. Here's what we were able to deliver to the family just before Christmas!

Our annual walk down the block to the Christmas tree sale at the Dunshee House was even more fun this year with the wagon...

We ventured up to Paradise on Mt. Rainier just after Christmas. It was a long drive (longer than Paul or I realized when we began the journey...), but Sammy loved the toddler sledding hill, and Nina had a great time trooping around the beautiful lodge.

Here's Nina, sporting her new bibs and snow boots that we bought en route. In retrospect, probably not a necessary purchase, given that she much preferred the gift shop to the mountain!

And here's a video of Sammy, cruising down the mountain. The scene you see in this video was repeated, oh, about 23 more times or so. We were amazed that our normally cautious girl was totally unfazed with her repeated wipeouts on the mountain!

Sisters

Steps

With Nina now toddling around all over the place, it's hard to believe it was just a month ago that she was practicing her first steps. Here's a video of some of those early steps, taken by Gramps...

Thanksgiving in the City of Roses

It seems like a long time ago now, but we had a great Thanksgiving in Portland with the Savages and Flosis. As usual, it was really fun to get the cousins together. Sammy and her cousin Becca are just five months apart in age, and were inseparable throughout the weekend. Jake, who is now 5 and in kindergarten, took extra special care of his cousin Nina, making sure she always had a buddy when the big girls were off doing their own thing. Meanwhile, we as parents and grandparents actually had a few minutes to catch up!

Here are some pictures from our fun weekend...

the whole gang!

Nina and Jake

the girls try their hand at Nani and Papa's piano...

Nina snuggles with her new quilt from Nani
Game is on between two of the biggest competitors in the family...