As expected, we all had a great Thanksgiving holiday this year. We hosted dinner and were joined by Amy, Tom, Rick, Chris, Dana, Brad, Butch, Carol, and Kallan. The house was full, the food was delicious, the wine was flowing, the girls were very well behaved, and the Seahawks beat the 49ers. What more could you ask for? We had been looking forward to this day for a while and we couldn’t have asked for it to go any better. To all of you who attended, thank you for making it such a great day, and to all of you whom we weren’t able to spend the day with, we send our love and hope that you enjoyed the day as much as we did.
The rest of the weekend has been pretty busy for us. Normally when we get a visit from either of the Grandpa’s, Jessica makes a list of home-related projects for them to work on. In this case we were lucky enough to have both Grandpa’s in town at the same time, so there was plenty of work going on around the house. Since we recently moved Ava and Elise into a new bedroom, there was plenty to get done in there, including mounting the TV on the wall, hanging chandeliers, moving their closet over from the old room, and decorating. In addition, we reorganized the laundry room and moved chandelier in the kitchen so that it was out of the way and people wouldn’t continue to hit their head when standing up from the table. Mom and the Grandma’s also did some really nice crafty work around the house in preparation for Christmas.
The girls are both doing really well, and of course they’ve been keeping everyone busy at all times. Elise’s vocabulary is literally growing by the day, and I can’t believe just how much she’s talking now. Ava has been enjoying playing with her new birthday presents, and is continuing to do well with potty training, but we’re still having problems with sharing. The general rule of thumb goes like this: there are more toys in the house than Ava could possibly play with at one time, but if she sees Elise playing with something, she becomes immediately obsessed with whatever Elise has and ends up throwing a fit if she can’t have it. We’ve been working on sharing, as well as the concept of trading toys, and it’s going okay, but there is definitely some room for improvement. I love the idea of them learning the barter system at such a young age, and for the most part they have been successful with it, but its to be expected that sometimes you end up with a temper tantrum or some type of outburst.
Yesterday we woke up with two inches of fresh snow on the ground. If you’ve ever lived in our neck of the woods then you know that snow is a rare treat for us, so it really added to the whole holiday theme for the weekend. I didn’t expect it to last past the afternoon, but it’s been unseasonably cold around here lately, and the skies were clear, so as I write this on Sunday night we’ve still got a decent amount outside. None of it stuck to the roads though, so driving wasn’t an issue. As far as that goes I’m more concerned about ice than anything else, but I doubt we’ll have any issues.
Last night Amy and Tom stayed home with the girls so that Jessica and I could go out to see a movie. As the parents of small children, it’s not all that common for us to get out on our own to do something like that, so we were pretty excited. We ended up seeing Mockingjay, which is the third part of the Hunger Games series. Although I was unexpectedly impressed by the first two movies, in my opinion the one we saw last night was a dud. Jessica liked it, mostly because she read all the books and was much more familiar with the storyline than myself, but in my opinion it was boring, hard to follow, and lacking excitement. A far cry from the first two installments of the series. It doesn’t matter though; just getting out to do something on our own is a nice treat and we always have fun no matter what.
Tomorrow is ‘Cyber Monday’ and its our busiest day of the year at Amazon. That shouldn’t really mean anything for my team since we don’t own any software, but it’s important to have all hands on deck just in case we need to provide any type of assistance to an engineering team that owns a critical application. You work all year at Amazon in preparation for Q4, and in particular for this day, so hopefully it will go off without a hitch. I’ll be in town all week this week, then flying out the following Monday morning for a work trip to Toronto. I’ve never been there before but am looking forward to visiting the Amazon office out there. I regularly work via phone and email with several teams in that office, so it will be nice to finally meet them all in person. Although it will likely be extremely cold, I’m still looking forward to seeing the city. No more traveling for me after that though (unless its just a day-trip) as I need to be nearby for Jessica while we await Enzo’s arrival. Only two months to go…
Thanks again to everyone who joined us for Thanksgiving and making it such a great day. Below are a few recent photos of the girls. The ones of Elise were taken on Thanksgiving, and the rest were taken by my good friend Leon at Ava’s birthday party the previous weekend. He’s giving me a CD with quite a few more photos from that day, so I’m sure we’ll have some more good ones to share very soon. Happy Holidays everyone!
Elise on Thanksgiving
Photos from Ava’s 3rd birthday
