Christmas!

Finally some photos of our Christmas happenings. The festivities always start the day after Thanksgiving when we deck our halls. Then, about a week later, we picked out a tree.

John as Clark Griswold (above)

Then on Christmas Eve, we took a hike in the hills near our house. This now has become one of Nora's favorite things to do. She just wants to hike and hike and hike.

Then came the traditional---and very tasty, I might add---Christmas Eve dinner. I also bought some poppers this year; the kind that have those little tissue paper crowns inside that are common in Britain. Those poppers may have been Nora's favorite part of all of Christmas.

Also, I would apologize for the less than stellar quality of these pictures, except that they are always bad and I'm sure you've figured by now that we are not professional photographers. Plus, we always have terrible lighting wherever we live. Some day I will have overhead lighting. Some day.

 Opening up Christmas Jammies.

 and modeling the jammies

 Christmas morning.

Then after opening presents at our place and going to church, we headed over to the parents' house for more gifts and merry making. My mom made Nora and Eve dress up dresses and here is Eve checking herself out in hers (below).

catch up (which is what i'm always doing on this blog)

Surprisingly, I have some pictures to share (it's surprising because I always forget to take pictures).

I caught Nora singing into the door handle like it was a microphone while spending some quality time on the toilet

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I turned 30! And had mini ice cream cakes!

and blew out candles!

... and John took me on a trip to San Francisco! (all right, all right, enough of the exclamation points).

starting the Land's End trail at the Sutro Baths

 

we got to see Bernini's Medusa at the Palace of the Legion of Honor

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we took a little boat trip to Catalina Island 

Halloween costumes

Here are photos from Halloween night. Nora was a bee and Eve a flower (all Nora's own idea). We had fun trick-or-treating in our neighborhood, but Nora was done after about 10 minutes. When she said, "Let's go back home" John whispered to me, "That's it??" 

Pumpkin Patch

What Halloween would be complete without a trip to the local pumpkin patch? 

As I'm posting this, I'm realizing that I don't have great pictures. But, eh, it's all I've got. 

And next... carving the pumpkin. We actually bought our pumpkins at Trader Joe's because the prices at the patch were kind of ridiculous.

here is Nora drawing ideas for what the pumpkin should look like

and here's the finished product. It's one giant eye, if you can't tell (and you probably can't). The inspiration was Mike  Wazowski from Monster's Inc. 

N.J.'s 4th birthday party

Here are scenes from Nora's four-year-old birthday party. I just realized that she's the only subject in any of the photos... but I swear there were other people there. We kept it low-key and invited family members (I figured this was probably the last year I could get away with not doing a full-blown birthday bash, so I had better take advantage).

                            

the ubiquitous first day of school pictures

Nora started preschool last Monday. She has been counting down the days until she could go and was very excited to get ready for her big First Day. 

This next sequence of photos is my favorite (especially the last one, even though it's blurry). She is saying, "I'm SO excited for school!"