New Year's Eve

Ah, the end of another year. And the beginning of a new family tradition: the eating of the gingerbread house. Chris remembers his family breaking into the gingerbread house on New Year’s Eve when he was a kid, so we’ve decided to make a new family tradition for ourselves. (The grown-ups didn’t care much for week-old gingerbread, but the kids didn’t much mind. Maybe we should decorate a second house on New Year’s Eve to use from now on…)

The anticipation.

The demolition.

The payoff.

Happy New Year!

(Hey, we get the Times Square ball drop live this year!)

Merry Christmas!

Ah, what a wonderful Christmas we've had! Being with family, enjoying the Spirit of the season, and great food--what could be better? We hope that your Christmas has been just as wonderful for you as it has been for us.

Hailey and Mia modeling their new scarves and hats from Grandma Van Wagenen

Our Christmas ham, up close and personal

The Christmas feast with Grandma and Grandpa Barajas

Hailey and Chris admiring the star on our tree

Beautiful gifts

The 2nd annual gingerbread house

Creating the gingerbread house

Let it snow!

So Dec 5 was the first snowfall of the season in the DC area. Seeing as we don't get much snow in Yuma, we took the opportunity to go out and play in it. Fun times!

The dog, the hog, the frog, and the log

Hailey wrote this cute little story in school this week and I thought it was too good not to share.

Just in case the image isn't clear enough to read, the text says, "The dog chast the hog and the hog chast the frog and then they all sat on a log and that is the story. The end."

The longest holiday of the year?

So, my question is how many times are your kids going trick-or-treating this year? I am finding that this year we have many opportunities for it.

On Saturday we went trick-or-treating around to all of the little shops that are next door to our apartment building. The shops at Pentagon Row hosted a trick-or-treat day for kids. It was actually pretty neat. (The weather was almost perfect, so the kids got to wear the more lightweight costumes they won't be able to wear on chilly Halloween night.) Nearly all of the stores and restaurants (and there are quite a few) handed out candy as the kids came by. They even got to decorate their own pumpkin cookies at Sur la Table. Hailey and Mia had a great time filling up their buckets with pre-Halloween candy. That was T-or-T #1.

T-or-T #2 will be the church trunk-or-treat tomorrow night.

Then, of course, the real T-or-T on Wednesday night will be #3.

So, now my next question: What do you do with ALL of that dreadful Halloween candy? Give it away? Throw it away? Let the kids go crazy with it? All I can say is that whatever I do with it the dentist is going to have a heyday.

Hailey drew this in honor of Halloween.

Happy Halloween to all!

Mount Vernon

A couple of weekends ago we went down to Mount Vernon, George Washington's home, for the day. We took a sightseeing boat down the Potomac River to get to Mount Vernon and then back again. It was really neat. We all enjoyed it, but the girls thought the boat trip was a little long (an hour and a half each way). We didn't get to see everything there, so we'll be going back sometime.

This is the mansion. Quite impressive.

This is the view of the Potomac (and our boat) from the back of the mansion.

This is our house as seen from the river. YEAH, RIGHT! (There are some pretty awesome, huge homes on the Potomac.)

Hailey and "massive head-wound Harry".

Chris took this picture from the boat. If you look closely the bird has a fish in its mouth.

Hailey's Artwork

Hailey loves to draw. She has told me that she wants to be an artist. I love when she draws things for me. She has gotten rather good at it, too. I just wanted to share a few of the things she has drawn recently.

Hailey drew this for her teacher yesterday. I thought it was really nice. I especially like the birds.

This was the flip side of the picture for her teacher. It's a night-time camping scene. All she needs in this one is S'mores.

This one she drew today. I've always loved palm trees. I think she did quite well with it.

Coolest Park in Arlington/McLean

So we've been introduced to the coolest park we've ever been to without having to pay for admission. It's called Clemyjontri Park in McLean, VA. (The lady who funded the park and donated the land named it after her kids: Carolyn (CL), Emily (EMY), Jon (JON), and Patrina (TRI).) When we drove up to it it looked like a mini amusement park. It is huge! The kids had a great time. It's about a 20 minute drive from where we live, but it's well worth the trip.

This is only about a third of the full size of the park.

Here is another third of the park. The panels to the right of Hailey are part of a kid size maze.

We were going to come to the park a day earlier, but Mia got crazy that evening in the mall and tripped into the corner of a trash bin and got a nearly one inch cut on her forehead. No stitches luckily, but she still looked like massive head-wound Harry. (The bandage and tapes are off now--she looks much better.)

Here are the girls with a couple of little friends they made for the day.

Fun times!

Arlington? Washington DC? What?

We've received a few emails from people wondering what we are doing in Arlington/the DC area. I suppose I should have mentioned it before. (Hmm. I thought I did. Ah, memory loss--the true sign of age.)

Chris has not changed his work. We are still based in Yuma, but he is on temporary assignment at headquarters in Washington DC. He is rubbing shoulders with all of the big wigs here as a consequence and is doing very well. We are tentatively scheduled to return to Yuma in May 2008. Until then we are enjoying the area and the history here.

Hope everything is well in everyone else's neck of the woods.

National Book Festival

Today was the National Book Festival held on the National Mall. What a neat festival! We had a lot of fun walking around looking at everything. The girls liked the PBS Kids section where they got to play games, do art activities, and get free things. Mia especially liked seeing the costumed characters from PBS Kids. We got some more books signed by authors, namely Mercer Mayer (Little Creature books) and Rosemary Wells (Max and Ruby books). Here are some pics of the event. (I couldn't resist including the picture Chris took of the Target dog.)

Cool pics

Chris took these pictures tonight from our balcony. He's quite the photographer, I think.

Book signings and cross-cultural play dates

Has anyone ever heard of the book The Kissing Hand or any of its sequels? Last year in Kindergarten Hailey brought home a "kissing hand" to me. She traced her hand on construction paper and glued it onto a card with an explanation on it. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, a mother raccoon lets her little raccoon know that her love will go with him anywhere when she places a kiss on the palm of his hand. It's a very sweet story, and was great for a kindergartner who was going to school for the first time. Well, today at a book store in Arlington, we got to meet the author, Audrey Penn, and have her sign our books. She is quite a nice lady, and she was wonderful with the kids. She has 2 other stories in this series, A Pocket Full of Kisses and A Kiss Goodbye. Both of them are good little stories. Her books deal gently with issues that younger ones sometimes face (starting school, getting a new sibling, moving). She plans on publishing a new book for every school year. If you aren't familiar with her books, you should check them out sometime. (As a side note, a bunch of copies of The Kissing Hand were sent overseas to the military. The servicemen and women were recorded reading the book, and the recordings were sent back to their families so their children could have dad or mom read a bedtime story to them. I thought that was such a wonderful thing. Apparently they will be doing it again with her latest book.)

After the book signing, we went to a park nearby so Mia could run around and get out the wiggles. (She could run around and get out the wiggles 24 hours a day.) While we were there we met a very nice Russian lady and her daughter. She is from Moscow and her daughter, though born here, speaks Russian. Mia and Olivia are only a month apart in age, so they had fun playing together despite the language barrier. It was quite funny, actually. Olivia was making up words because she wants to be able to speak English and has a difficult time with it, while Mia was making up words because that's just what she does. Perhaps on some preschool level they understood each other. While we were there another Russian man and his son showed up. He didn't speak much English, but Luba, Olivia's mother, spoke English very well. Also there was a woman from Poland with her daughter. I think we were pretty evenly divided, half native-half foreign. We really are in a multi-cultural area here in Arlington. It's a neat experience that we never got in California or Arizona. Too bad my Russian speaking brother-in-law wasn't here--he would have been in heaven!

The Washington Monument

We decided to go to the Washington Monument today since Chris had a mid-week day off. Of course we forgot to bring our camera. (This picture is from June.) We took the 70-second elevator ride to the 500-foot level where we looked out from all 4 compass points to see the view of DC and beyond. How amazing! We could see everything--even our apartment! We see the Washington Monument every day from our balcony, so it was cool to see it the other way around! Did you know that it is the world's tallest free standing masonry building? The granite blocks are not held together with mortar, but rather with a little bit of caulking. Nice of them to tell us that on the way down instead of on the way up. On the ride down we got to see bits of the inside of the Monument. Memorial stones line the inside, donated and given from everywhere. It was fantastic! One day we want to take a tour up the stairs so we can see everything inside. Of course we will have to be in marathon condition to climb up 500-feet of steps. We plan on going back in a couple of weeks for another tour, and we will be sure to have our camera with us! (I'll post more pictures then.)

The Knight Bus

I was looking through my photos of DC and came across these ones from June. The Knight Bus was making a tour across the US prior to the release of Harry Potter Book 7 and they happened to stop at the main library in Arlington. They did a tour of the bus for kids of a certain age, but Hailey missed the age cut off by 7 months. We did get to do all of the library activities, though, like wand making, jelly bean tasting, and find the snitch. Hailey and Mia had a good time, and we got some fun pictures by the bus. Thought they were cute enough to share.

Remembering

Today marks a very important anniversary in the history of our nation. It should mean something to every American wherever they are, but it really makes an impact on me today, where I am. I stood at my balcony this morning and looked out across to the Pentagon. What a devastating sight must have been seen from this very same balcony six years ago. I find it so sad that a nation united in grief and burgeoning strength those few years ago has dwindled back to the whining and the petty arguing of times before September 11th 2001. I think that the phrase "Never Forget" has somewhat been forgotten. No, the people we lost have not been forgotten; the heroes have not been forgotten. But the feeling, the emotion that united us in strength that day and the days following has been. As I sit here and look at the flag illuminated by blue flood lights draping over the side of the Pentagon, I find that I will most assuredly never forget.

Instrument "petting zoo"

The Kennedy Center had an event this weekend for kids and families. They had puppeteers, musical artists, and an instrument "petting zoo" where the kids got to try out different kinds of musical instruments. Mia liked the violin and, of course, the noisy percussion instruments. Hailey liked the flute even though she couldn't make sound. It was kind of hot and humid so we didn't get to do and see everything, but the "zoo" made it fun.

Life in DC

Well, here we are in Washington DC. Chris has been here since May 6, and the girls and I were here from May 30 through July 4, but now we are here officially. The girls and I have been back for about two and a half weeks now, and we are getting into the swing of things. Hailey is into her 2nd week of school and likes her teacher and her new friends. May will be a long time in coming (when Chris's detail should officially be over), but we will enjoy the ambiance and culture of the east coast while we can.