Friday, January 30, 2009

Bedtime routine


Elizabeth just loves her stuffed animals and dolls. She plays with them all day long, carrying them around the house, wheeling them on her buggy and zooming them through the kitchen in her grocery cart. However, every evening Elizabeth puts all of her friends to bed, i.e "Night Night." She has a big pink and blue blanket that her Great Aunt Patty made for her, she lays it out on the floor and puts every single stuff animal, doll, Strawberry Shortcake figure, Mrs. Potato Head etc. to sleep. Here she is putting them all in her camp chair, a new addition to the stuffed friend activities!

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Same Old Dog, New Picture

Well, its been a particularly quiet time of year these past few weeks. Its been pretty warm outside considering that it is winter, but still cold enough to keep us from getting out and thus we haven't posted too many exciting new pictures - well except for the Zoo... Fortunately Spring is on the horizon and we have some exciting trips planned this year that we will be sure to share the photos from. For now though, here is our lazy dog, Julio, living up his Sunday to its maximum potential! I thought that this photo was only fitting....


Some days being a dog doesn't look too bad, particularly this dog!

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Family Trip to the Denver Zoo

This last weekend the weather was terrific, sunny and upper 50s, so we decided to head out to the Denver Zoo to visit all of the inmates and primates!
Elizabeth just loves penguins. She calls them "gickgews" or something like that. Our first trip to the zoo back in October, Elizabeth had to go back and see the penguins about five times. This time we only went back twice but they still proved to be very interesting to her.


Does this guy have the ultimate comb-over or what?


This fish was my favorite this time at the zoo. This fish has the ability to store water around its gills so that it can go up onto land to find food and "breathe" off of the oxygenated water for a little while.






Inauguration Day: Out with the Old... Pictures?

Now I had originally intended to write a post here about our family trip to the Denver Zoo this past weekend but was checking in on a friend's blog and came across these great pictures that I just had to copy and post. I hope you don't mind Amy! It turns out that seemingly forever ago Kate and Amy marched at the inauguration for Bill Clinton. You can check out her recount of the event on her blog here: Nice Job Amitha!

"Cadet Katie" and "Amitha" were roommates back in the old Academy days and later we were neighbors when Kate and Amy's husband, Rich, were back teaching at the Air Force Academy.
What cool pictures!

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Christmas Part 2

Immediately after we returned from Seattle, Grandma and Grandpa Smits ventured out to sunny Colorado to visit for New Years and 2nd Christmas!

Elizabeth had a wonderful time dancing with Grandma and Grandpa to Elmo's "Hot, Hot, Hot"Grandma also couldn't pass up this giant penguin at one of the after Christmas blow out sales and is now one Elizabeth's favorites!
On one of our days we had some nice fresh snow and got to get out and play in it a little. We all bundled up and headed out. Even Gregario got to come along and he loves the snow!

We had a great time with Grandma and Grandpa during their visit! We did some swimming at the pool, Kate and I got to do some skiing, we ate some great food and had a wonderful time spent together as a family. We are already looking forward to a snowy Christmas in Michigan next year!

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Christmas 2008 in Seattle

We had a wonderful Christmas in Seattle with our family. The highlight of the trip was having Elizabeth, Avery and Madeline all together. They played so well together and I was surprised on how well Elizabeth could keep up with her older cousins. On Christmas Eve, we went to mass at Our Lady of the Rosary and the girls were all dressed up in their matching Christmas dresses. They looked adorable. Mass, however, was more like a madhouse than anything (dinner time, over packed church with thousands of little munchkins running around all geeked about about Santa coming that evening) but the pictures make it seem so peaceful. Elizabeth just loved the manger scene at the front of the church.



One of the many highlights of the trip was Santa at the grocery store. Michael and Courtney have a great grocery store right across the street from their house and there was a great looking Santa Clause there on Christmas Eve. We brought Avery and Madeline over to see Santa and the girls were so excited. Elizabeth likes to look at pictures and ornaments of Santa but when she met him in "person"she said no no and ran the other way in tears. She didn't want anything to do with him this year. Avery was just the opposite as you can see in this picture!


Christmas day was so much fun, watching the girls open all of their presents from Santa and just relaxing around the house. We made a fabulous dinner of rib roast and crab cakes and mom went to town, chomping on the beef bone! The best part!


Another highlight of our trip was the Seattle Aquarium. It's a fabulous aquarium for little kids (and big kids too) as most of the exhibits are at a lower level or kid accessible and there are tons of tanks where you can touch the star fish, sea cucumbers and sea anemones.


My favorite part of the aquarium was the giant octopus. We sometimes see octopus when we go scuba diving at night as they are only really active in the dark. This octopus, however, had his time table mixed up and was crawling all over his tank while we were visiting. It was such a neat experience to see him move! And the girls really got a kick out of seeing "Nemo" so we had to include him in our blog.



The last day of our Seattle adventure, we went to an amazing seafood buffet (all you can eat crab legs, oysters, shrimp . . . need I say more). Considering that it was the only time that it was not snowing or raining, we took the opportunity to take a few pictures outside of the restaurant.











And here are a few more shots that we just love. The girls are all so photogenic!








British Isles!!! Mega Post!!!

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