Christmas Day

There was an extended flurry of opening and testing out new toys...


...then special smoothies for breakfast...

...then we all loaded up for a drive up to Snoqualmie pass to play in the snow.

Rosie talked to a snowman.

Auggie got obsessed with trying to build a snowfort, or igloo, or something. He really stuck to it for a long time!

And on the way home, everyone passed out in a holiday daze.
It was a great day, all around!

View videos of it all, including sledding, at http://www.youtube.com/user/cudgelfunkhouser

Christmas Morning

Here's some video of the twins opening presents this morning.

I will probably add longer versions of this and other Christmas video on our youtube account ("cudgelfunkhouser").

We Run into Santa on a Streetcorner...

We went downtown last night to look at all the lights and mingle with the big holiday crowd. We had never gotten around to taking the kids to see Santa at one of the malls/stores, which we were feeling a little bad about. But we've been very busy, and it's so expensive, etc., so it wasn't looking like it was going to happen this year.
So we were extremely pleased when we stumbled upon Santa all by himself sitting in a walker/chair on a streetcorner downtown (with a donation bucket and a hand-written sign that said "Picture with Santa").
We stopped to say hello, but, alas, we had not brought our camera with us. That was no problem for Old Saint Nick, though--he had a polaroid camera ready for just such an emergency! So with Daddy acting as camera man, we were able to finally get our photo with Santa and tell him what we wanted for Christmas. And all at a very low rate, too!

Artwork

The kids have developed some distinctive styles when it comes to artwork.

August has rather suddenly gone from nondescript scribblings to representational pictures that are actually identifiable to the observer. Can you tell what this is?
That's right--it's a pig's face!



Rose is working on a much more abstract style. One that kind of borders on OCD, actually. She'll take a single marker and spend a half an hour methodically filling in an entire sheet of paper. And she's not satisfied until every inch is colored!