September 2013, a set on Flickr.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Late Summer 2013
And suddenly, the end of summer is upon us!
After returning home from our trip to Ohio, we jumped right
into preparing for birthday celebrations and back-to-school preparations! But we also made sure to enjoy our last
few weeks of summer break together too!
Can you believe it?
We’re three years old! We
celebrated a few different ways this year. First, of course, we got to travel to see our families in
Ohio, who we miss so much, and really enjoyed sharing our birthday anticipation
there. J
At home, Mommy took us to a local “cupcakery”, to pick out,
decorate, and enjoy eating cupcakes of our choice. We’d been talking about what kind and color of cake we’d
like for our 3rd birthday for quite a while, so this was a fun way
to let everyone choose something they liked! We also got to pick out flavors to
take home for our actual birthday!
We got to invite our friends to play with us at the park for
our birthday. We shared breakfast
treats, made butterflies, and played with friends from our multiples and Vienna
playgroups. We had a great time
playing, and it was extra special for us to invite our friends to celebrate
with us!
We celebrated with a family dinner out to a new restaurant,
where we enjoyed quite a variety of appetizers (including a huge container of
popcorn!), and a surprise birthday ice cream to blow out and eat.
Then on the morning of our birthday, the kitchen was all
decorated for our big day, with the balloons and streamers we helped Mommy pick
out. We also were greeted by a
special balloon that sang “Happy Birthday” when you tap it. After breakfast, we got to go on our
very first boat ride! Our boat,
the Miss Mallory, took us from Alexandria to Georgetown, and then back
again. We got to eat lunch while
seeing the monuments, explored the boat, and saw lots of planes take off and
land at the airport. What a fun
experience! And that night, we
enjoyed decorating our own cupcakes for dessert and blowing out those candles
one more time.
Amongst all the preparations, we made the most of our last weeks
of summer break together. We
continued to enjoy play dates, puppet shows, trips to Frying Pan Park, story
times, concerts, and even a Mommy and Me class at Whole Foods. We visited lots of favorite and new playgrounds…
Wolf Trails, Meadowlane, Clemyjontri, Cabin John, Algonquian Park, Glyndon,
Great Falls, and Holy Comforter – where we met some of our new classmates in
Mrs. Shoemaker’s class at HCEP! We
tried out a cool swimming pool with kid-friendly water attractions, visited the
fish and frogs at Meadowlark Gardens, rode the neat train at Cabin John Park,
enjoyed a picnic at Gravelly Point, and saw the new elephant exhibit at the
National Zoo.
And finally, we spent the last week of the month getting to
know Miss Kristy, who will be playing with us when we’re not in preschool this
year. We also love playing with
her kids, Jordan, Emma, and baby Alex.
How fun it is for us to have an older “sibling” and a baby in our lives,
as well as another new friend who will be going to our new school! We had so much fun our first week
together, trying out dancing, swimming, Messy Art Day, and bowling. We’ll still miss Mommy when she’s at
work, but we are so excited about this great start for our new school year!
We can’t wait to share what happens next! Until then, here are our favorite photos
from this month. We hope you enjoy
them!
Love,
Katharine and Christopher
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Mid-Summer Update
Although it seems school just got out, summer is well
underway. June and July have flown
by!
The end of the school year kept our family busy. After our trip to Shenandoah over Memorial Day, it was suddenly June! For Mom, this meant getting ready for the Spring Concert (which we actually got to see!), finishing grades, and checking off end-of-year to-do lists. Meanwhile, we had fun playing with our friends at school for the last couple weeks of the year. And our teacher’s husband, “Mr. Willa”, treated us to a magic show and end-of-year ice cream luncheon. Mommy even got to come down to join us for lunch that day!
Amidst all the busy-ness of the end of the school year, we also did lots of fun things together as a family! We splashed in the fountains in the Mosaic District, and enjoyed the Saturday morning cartoons on the big screen. And, we got to watch planes fly RIGHT overhead at Gravelly Point, down by Reagan National Airport. It was SO neat to see and hear the planes take off from a runway straight towards us, before they went up over the Potomac, right over our heads. We also liked watching the boats in the water there.
For Father’s Day weekend, Daddy treated us to our first real train ride, on the Metro. It was so neat to see the train Daddy rides to work, and then we hiked around DC to explore some of the monuments for the first time. And we had a fun dinner out with Daddy to celebrate his special day!
And then on Father’s Day, we got to go to Dulles Airport to
pick up Grandma! Mommy still had
school for a few days, but our classes were done, so Grandma came to play with
us at home! We got to play with
Grandma all day while she was here.
We went out for a special dinner together, and rode the kids’ train at
the mall for the first time.
Grandma also went with us to music class, which was super fun. And then when Mommy got out of school,
we were able to take Grandma to the Zoo for the new elephant and America
exhibits. We got to see lots of
neat animals and watched the seal show, before having a fun picnic on the
grass.
We were sad to say bye-bye to Grandma when she went back to Ohio, but really happy to be home together for the summer. We’ve been helping Mommy water our flowers and bean plants – which actually sprouted beans we could taste! We’ve been going to music class, exploring farmers’ markets, trips to Great Harvest Bread, story times, puppet shows, and other programs at the library, and playing with our playgroup friends. We played baseball for the first time at our friend Miles’ birthday party, which inspired Daddy to take us out to get our own baseball tee – we love playing with it! We also made our own sandbox for the backyard, and began stockpiling sand toys to prepare for our first trip to the beach!
We rounded out the month of June with some reunions – the NICU family reunion at the hospital, where we saw some of the other kids we have met from our NICU experience. And we got to see some old friends and play some fun games at the NVPOM (Parents of Multiples) picnic.
July began with our very first trip to the beach! We spent the 4th of July weekend at Rehoboth beach. We had so much fun there! We had breakfast in our hotel, spent the mornings playing on the beach, the afternoons napping, and the evenings eating fun dinners out and riding rides at Funland. On the 4th, we stayed out late to play and watched the beginning of the fireworks in our pajamas. When we decided we’d rather see them a little farther away (i.e. from the balcony of our hotel room), we headed back to share cookies and milk over fireworks. We had a great view, and still enjoy talking about the big booms and fire in the sky. We weren’t able to capture our favorite beach fun in photos, for obvious reasons - The waves were a little too strong and unpredictable for us to swim, but we loved when Mommy and Daddy would hold us right in the wave as it crashed in, or held our hands as the water crashed around our toes, and sometimes even as high as our chest! What an exciting trip! Check out our photos for more about all we saw and did at the beach.
Back at home, we began wearing our much-anticipated “Big Kid Underwear!” We are very proud of our growing independence, and love picking our favorite pair out each morning. In addition, Mommy and Daddy are sure to have some great stories to tell (or not!) one day. After staying home to hone our new skills more, we quickly resumed our summer adventures. We’ve enjoyed some fun concerts, more playing with friends, cooking projects/experiments and playing at home with Mommy, shows at the library, playing and riding bikes at the park, and playing with water toys on very hot days.
The end of July treated us to a wonderful trip home to visit our family there. We had a wonderful time with Grandma and Grandpa Keller, reading stories together, riding our bikes and flying kites, going to the Great Lakes Science Center and the Akron Zoo (we had a close up encounter with their new Grizzly Bear exhibit!), and enjoying nice dinners together and even a fun birthday cupcake surprise! We then got to enjoy another wonderful visit with Grandma and Grandpa Sturgeon. We played in the sandbox and pond with Katie and Sam; rode the golf cart, fed the fish, and worked on puzzles together with Grandma and Grandpa; and had some more fun on our bikes and even the little scooter toys. We enjoyed our very first trip to McDonalds’ Play Place, while everyone chatted over breakfast and coffee. And we got to be part of a special birthday surprise tea party Miss Ann threw for Mommy. We were very well behaved at our first tea party, and had great fun playing with all the kids. We had so much fun visiting our Ohio families, and can’t wait to see our families again – we miss them so much!
We can’t believe we’re almost three! We’re so excited about our upcoming birthday and what kinds of cake/party/etc we could have. Katharine says "red cake", and Christopher says "chocolate." And then soon enough, we'll be getting to know our first nanny, Ms. Kristy, and her kids, and getting ready to start our new preschool this fall!
Until then, here are our photos from June and July. We hope you enjoy them!
Love,
Christopher and Katharine (not really toddlers… almost
preschoolers!)
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