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!