November 2014

-->

After all the excitement in October, November began with slower days, time to play at home, accomplish things, and be thankful to be together. We worked on our cutting and letter writing skills for school at home.  We were happy to remember someone we love each morning at breakfast, using our “Give Thanks” calendar.

We finished up our hip hop dance class this month, began our first Pee Wee Paddler 2 swim classes, saw Santa’s workshop at the mall, and went to a fun “Okee Dokee Brothers” concert with our friend Zach at the National Geographic Live theater.  With several nice weather days, we even went on walks and had some lunches on the deck.

We sang in our very first worship service, with our Joyful Noise Chorus at church, singing the chorus part of “All Things Bright And Beautiful”.

And at the end of the month, we went on several fun holiday outings, beginning on a very beautiful, warm night at the Meadowlark Light display.  It was a perfect night to wear our red and green and take some sweet photos for those Christmas cards!  And we had a great time, sharing s’mores and exploring.

Then it turned brrrrr, oh so cold, and we saw our first snow of the season, the day before Thanksgiving.  Not very much snow on the ground, but beautiful thick snow from the sky, and slushy enough to stomp around in later that night. 

On Thanksgiving Day, we went out for a special family dinner out, worked on our Christmas tree, and packed for our trip to Sesame Place!

We had a great day at Sesame Place again this year.  We rode SO many rides, and enjoyed watching the shows and the parade.  Our favorite things:  Katharine danced in the parade with one of the performers, and we rode our very first roller coaster many, many times! 

On Saturday, we delighted in breakfast at the hotel, and headed for home, stopping for our first visit at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, where we had a wonderful time exploring!  From model trains to real train cars and locomotives to explore and learn about, we were tickled to see everything.  The Museum was decorated so colorfully for the holidays, and we had a special visit with the Civil War Era Santa there, and even met Mrs. Claus, too!  And we took our very first real train ride on their “mile one” train, surrounded by holiday music, and accompanied by a surprise visit with Santa, who walked the aisle to share candies and smiles with all the kids.

Back at home, we finished hanging ornaments on the tree, setting up our Advent Tree and calendar, and getting all our Christmas books, nativity sets, and other decorations ready for December! 

We are so excited for December, to see our families in Ohio soon! 

 

Love,

 Christopher and Katharine

October 2014

-->

October brought the beginning of fall, and all things fall fun!

We enjoyed playing with our friends at school and at church this month.  We had lots of fun learning new things in our dance and swim classes.  At home, we continue to work on letter practice and building masterpieces with large blocks!  And on warm days we had fun playing outdoors, biking, and putting up Halloween decorations

We had a great family fun day at Cox Farms Fall Festival one weekend, and enjoyed a beautiful family hike on the Cross County Trail the next.  We spent warm days playing and hiking in our neighborhood and exploring some of the new paths being completed.  We even stumbled across the opening ceremony for the new bike path that connects our street directly to the bike path the next! 

And oh my, we had SO much Halloween fun!  We chose to dress up as Chuggington trains together.  Christopher was “Wilson” and Katharine was “Koko”, while Mommy and Daddy were mechanics.  We trick-or-treated in our costumes at the “Air and Scare” event at the Air and Space Museum.  We attended our very first concert at the Kennedy Center – “The Whodunit Mystery” of the Missing Tuba, played by the National Symphony Orchestra!  We got to wear our costumes for trick or treating and tried out all instruments we could at the “Instrument Petting Zoo” beforehand.  AND the student performer who had taken the missing tuba turned out to be one of Mommy’s students, and we got to watch him perform with the NSO!

We marched in our very first Halloween Parade, a Vienna tradition - what a thrilling, but very late night! We remembered to make jack-o-lanterns on the eve of Halloween - Whew!  On Halloween Day, we marched in the costume parade at our school, and then Trick-Or-Treated in our neighborhood, after their annual kick-off party.  When we got home, we were thrilled to pass out candy to the kids still making rounds on our street. 

Next on our list is to prepare for the time-change, the end of fall, and the upcoming holiday season.  We are so excited to look forward to snow, but for now, revel in marching through and kicking up the leaves, and trying to catch them as they fall.

We hope you are enjoying a wonderful fall, and please enjoy our favorite photos from this month!

Love,

Christopher and Katharine

Back To School! September 2014

-->

September was a wonderfully fun and busy month!

We celebrated Labor Day together at the National Harbor.   We enjoyed the morning exploring the Children’s Museum, eating lunch out, and even rode the Capitol Ferris Wheel, with incredible views over the water!  What a special treat!

We were so excited for the opening of school, to meet our new teachers, and begin our Pre-K 4 year at Holy Comforter.  We are happy to have new and old friends in our class, and we still get to play with other friends at school on the playground!  Katharine’s first job in class was weather helper, and Christopher’s was snack helper, but we get new jobs each week.  Mommy and Daddy are already surprised by the way we are learning to draw and write our names, and we have fun learning together at home each week, cutting out pictures for the letter of the week book we are making at school!

We celebrated Mommy and Daddy’s birthdays with dinner out and special desserts at home!  For Mommy’s birthday, we picked out cupcakes from Whole Foods on our way home from school.  For Daddy’s birthday, we put our “chef hats” on to surprise him with a special pudding, chocolate, and graham cracker dessert we helped make.  He was SO surprised!

And we had a great time making cards and gifts for Kristy for Nanny Appreciation Week!  Each morning, we had so much fun giving her special surprises!

After “A” week at our school, learning all about apples (apple coring, apple painting, cooking free-form apple pies), we were so looking forward to our first family apple-picking trip!  We went to Waters Orchard in Maryland, a new orchard, where dwarf apple trees are trained low onto a trellis.  After a neat wagon ride to the orchard, we were delighted to see that we could really pick all our apples, right at our height!  We quickly collected a half-bushel of apples, and brought them home.  Then we washed them and helped make the pumpkin dip to go with them for our special snack for school.  Mommy let us stir in the cream cheese  and spices, and even let us try out her electric mixer.  We could hardly believe that her mixer used to be Grandma’s mixer!  Our friends LOVED the special, yummy snack, and we had fun sharing about our trip to the orchard with our class!

The last weekend of the month was beautiful, and perfect for our first race!  We ran the Teddy Bear 5K (we really did the 1K Fun Run/Walk) to benefit the McLean Children’s Center.  We had a ball playing all the fun games before the race, and were thrilled to receive a teddy bear as we crossed the finish line!  We certainly tired, and walked parts of our race, but were quickly motivated again by other children running by us.  And how exciting it was when we saw everyone cheering us on at the finish line!  What a fun day!

Love Christopher and Katharine

We're FOUR! August 2014

-->

We had a great August!

With the school year around the corner, we made the most of every moment together this month. We continued to enjoy our soccer and ballet classes, and had fun working on projects at home too!

We saw ballet and concerts, visited the farm at Frying Pan Park, and learned about puppets at Wolf Trap Theater in the Woods.

We practiced riding our bikes, and even got to watch the new Metro rail in action, running right under us on the footbridge!

We got to see and explore in all kinds of service vehicles at the Reston Public Works Day, and enjoyed an up-close tour at the Vienna Fire Station!

We played with friends at a Sprinklers and Snow Cones event in the Vienna Town Green, and enjoyed a late summer trip to ride the Carousel and explore the playground at Clemyjontri Park.

And WE TURNED FOUR!  The week of our fourth birthday featured many fun celebrations, beginning on our actual birthday.  After opening some presents, we met Daddy for lunch in DC at Founding Farmers, where we enjoyed our 2^nd annual tradition of blowing candles out on our big bowl of ice cream, with warm homemade cookies.  After lunch, we had a great time running our fingers through the fountain that runs down the side of the IMF building next door. Once we were soaking wet, it was time to go home for nap.  After nap, our singing balloon and another birthday package arrived in the mail, much to our delight!  It was all birthday, all day!

Later that week, we were SO brave in getting our four-year old-shots, and made a well-earned stop at Starbucks with Mommy for treats of our choice. We even got to take some favorite stuffed friends with us!

And then we had a wonderfully fun Dinosaur Dig themed birthday party at Riverbend Park Nature center.  Friends from school and playgroup joined us for a dinosaur talk, a nature discovery walk, a mini-dino dig, and then a turtle feeding and petting demonstration.  We loved sharing treats and camouflage dinosaur cupcakes and balloons with our friends!

When Mom started back to work, we enjoyed some adventures with Kristy, Emmie, Alex, and Jordan, playing at playgrounds, a water park, and PB & Jack.

We rounded out the month, and the summer, with a very exciting trip over Labor Day Weekend – our first official camping trip in Shenandoah!  We spent two nights in our tent at Big Meadows campground.  We cooked and made S’mores over a really legitimate campfire two nights in a row.  We even got to roast our own hot dogs and marshmallows!  We visited the visitor’s center for bear and tool-related presentations, and even decorated our very own keepsake for the 50^th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act!  We hiked to Dark Hollow Falls and saw a really pretty waterfall.  Hiking back out, Daddy even saw a bear running through the woods!  But we didn’t get a picture of him. We also got to see a beautiful view of the valley below hiking just behind Big Meadows Lodge.   Our trip ended a little short because Katharine had a really rough wheezing cough on our last morning, and we thought it best to head home.  But we made the most of being at home on Labor Day by exploring the National Harbor (which will be featured in the September blog and album!).

We are so excited for the school year, and can’t wait to share all of our new four-year-old adventures with you!

We hope you enjoy our favorite photos from our August! 

Love,

Katharine and Christopher

July 2014

-->

WOW!  July FLEW by!

Once we got home from our exciting Ohio and Michigan trip, July was well underway, so this month’s update is a quick one!

We sprang right into our first soccer and ballet classes, playgroup play dates and playing with our Holy Comforter friends!  We played in the fountains, and saw concerts and puppet shows.   And we tried one more night camping in the backyard before our Labor Day weekend camping trip – it was so fun sleeping under the stars!

AND, we got to play with Grandma Sturgeon for a whole week, while Mommy was taking her guitar class.  We played in the water and sand together, painted, made crafts and puzzles, read stories, went out to dinner, and saw a concert and a really cool puppet show at Wolf Trap together.

We are almost four, and SO looking forward to our birthday!  We can’t wait to share about our Dinosaur Dig birthday party next month!

Love,

Katharine and Christopher

Summer 2014 Trip To Ohio And Michigan

-->

Our summer trip to Ohio and Michigan was wonderful! 

We had a wonderful visit at Grandma and Grandpa Keller’s house in Wadsworth for Grandpa Keller’s 75^th Birthday!  Our Aunt Linda and Uncle Matt were there too, with our cousins, Clara and Joseph!  We had so much fun spending several days playing together, riding bikes, fishing, going to church and out for brunch and lunch together, sharing some lovely family meals at their home, and celebrating together at Grandpa’s birthday party!  How we miss spending time together, on opposite sides of the country – time together is always a blessing!

Then we headed even further north into Michigan, where Daddy (as well as Grandma Keller) remember having fun family summer vacations as children.  We visited the Harbor Springs Pier, Stafford’s Pier Restaurant, Mackinac Island, The Cherry Hut, and The Sleeping Bear Dunes.  We rode in cars, shuttles, ferries, bikes, horse and carriage, and saw the Blue Angels jets.  We stayed at hotels, the Great Wolf Lodge, and drove our car past the 100,000-mile mark!  What an exciting trip! 

And then we had a fun week visiting at Grandma and Grandpa Sturgeon’s house in Kenton, where we biked, scooted, played in the sand and in the pond, rode the golf cart, fed the fish, swung on the swings, played with bubbles, and made pies!  The best parts of our visit were sharing time with our Grandma and Grandpa and playing with our Uncle Mike and Aunt Robyn, our cousins Katie and Sam, and playing with our Anderson friends-like-family, Chloe, Issac, and Luke.  How we miss being together – not across the country, but feeling like it with a daylong drive between us.  Time together is always a blessing.

Thank you to family and friends for a wonderful visit!  We can’t wait to see you again soon!

With all our love,

 

Christopher and Katharine

June 2014

-->

June meant the beginning of summer for us, and the end of the school year for our Mom!  And lots of fun adventures for our whole family!

During the week, Kristy took us on lots of fun outings!  We played at spray parks, saw concerts and magic shows, went to the library and playgrounds, painted our own art, and played on the new playground equipment at school.

We played together on the weekends.  We went to the farmer’s market and Saturday morning splash park cartoons.  We played with friends at our church picnic, and had fun being superheroes at our friend Anderson’s birthday party.

And our family explored some fun adventures.  We rode a riverboat on the C & O Canal at Riverbend Park – pulled by mules through the locks, as was originally done!  It was so neat to watch our boat rise and lower in the lock, when the gates were opened and closed!  We celebrated Father’s Day with Daddy by going to the aquarium in Baltimore, and got to visit the dolphins and see the new blacktop reef exhibit!  On the last weekend of the school year, Mommy spent a day with her friend, Carolyn, who is getting married, so we got to go with Daddy to the zoo!

Most of all, we looked forward to our Michigan vacation and our visits in Ohio with Grandmas, Grandpas, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins and friends!  We are SO excited to head for the hotels, go on a trip, and spend time with family! 

Here are our favorite photos from this month!  And keep an eye out for our Ohio and Michigan trip blog post and photos, coming soon!

Love,

 

Katharine and Christopher

May 2014

-->

May was a fun and busy month!

We finished our second round of Pee Wee Paddler I swim classes, and were proud of some of the increased independence we have in learning to use our arms and legs to float and move in the water.  One more round, and we may really be swimming!  In the meantime, we’re gaining confidence and having lots of fun!

We were proud to march in this year’s March For Babies, and were SO grateful for the donations made by family and friends to support our contributions to the cause.  It was a beautiful day for a hike/walk.  And after we finished the last few blocks on our own, we had so much fun listening to music, having a picnic, and trying out the Fun Bus!

The first Monday of the month, Mommy came to school with us for our class’ Mother’s Day celebration.  We made bracelets, shared snack, and shared things we love about our Mom.  And then we took Mommy out to brunch for our family Mothers’ Day at Willow Creek Farm, where we enjoyed the beautiful day with a nice walk and playing.

The beginning of beautiful weather found us outside a lot more, playing with bubbles and chalk, riding our bikes, and even hiking with our friend Zach!  We got explored Riverbend Park together and learned a lot about how to follow trail markers, which was SO fun!  We also proudly helped Mommy plant the flowers she received during teacher appreciation week, and added to the row of ferns we started when we were 1½!

We had so many special celebrations at the end of our school year at HCEP, from our class picnic to the closing ceremonies and picnic.  We started our last week of school with our “summer birthday” celebration, and we were so excited that we got to pick out our favorite treats to bring for snack – cupcakes and goldfish!   And we had lots of fun at our school picnic, playing on the playground, the bounce houses, and even getting our faces painted!

After school was over, we had a great Memorial Day weekend at home with Mama and Daddy.  We went to the farmers market, saw concerts and rode rides at the Viva Vienna festival, played at the park, ate out on the porch, and tried out new bikes and helmets at the bike store.  The best part of the weekend was camping outside in our family sized tent!  How fun it was to snuggle into our tents with our flashlights, and wake up to the sounds of the birds!

We also had an exciting visitor at our house!  The night we went out to the tent, we also discovered a little bat hanging upside down inside one of our windows!  He crawled in between the screen and partially open storm window, and was hanging there by one leg. In the night he left, and then had returned to almost exactly the same spot the next morning.  The next night, we waited for him to take his nightly trip out, and then we closed the window.  We named him “Butterfly”, but we are happy for his stay at our house to be a short one. 

A cute note from Mom – We are loving the way the kids care for one another (although typical sibling behavior is regularly expected as well).  One of our favorite things lately is Katharine’s new nickname for Christopher. “Brother” has shortened to “Brov”.  So lots of sentences now begin with “Hey Brov…..” 

Love,

Christopher and Katharine

April 2014

What a fun April we had!

From swimming to seeing the baby panda BaoBao at the zoo, we had a fun-filled April!  Over Spring Break, we enjoyed time with Mommy, checking out the new T Rex at the Natural History Museum, just before they closed the exhibit.  When we see the new one re-open, it will be 2019! And we got to meet Daddy for a fun lunch at Firefly, where we decorated our own cookies!

Over Easter, we enjoyed visiting with Grandma and Grandpa Sturgeon, hunted for eggs, and even had a fun kids event for Easter at church!

Those are the highlights of our month!  We hope you enjoy the photos by pasting the link below into your browser!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/alkdlk/sets/72157644195127130/

ALSO – Make sure to check out our video updates below (featuring NEW videos for January - April 2014!!)

Love,

Katharine and Christopher

January - April 2014

March 2014

-->

March was a continuance of the Winter that would NEVER end!  Although, we must admit, we were sort of glad to celebrate each snow day as if it were our last; we were definitely getting ready to let go of the snow in favor of Spring buds

So, again, the snow gave us lots of opportunities to be together at home this month!  We shoveled and sledded.  We fed the birds.  We painted inside, AND OUT!!

It snowed on St. Patrick’s Day, which gave us lots of time to experiment with how many things we could make that were green (green eggs, green milk, green mac and cheese, kiwi, grapes, and avocado dip with broccoli, and rainbow-colored ice cubes for our water!)

We made birthday treats and cards for Alex and Emmie, whose birthdays were this month. And Ooooohhhhh, what a month for birthdays!  We celebrated birthdays for our friends from school, Sloane, Arya, and Vivienne at children’s gyms, with some fun “Frozen” and superhero themes.  And we made our very own special friends to take home with us with Emmie at Build-A-Bear for her birthday.  It was an exciting month, and now we wait for the last birthday in our class – OURS!!

And we enjoyed church on Saturdays, and swim classes on Saturdays, playing on the playground there when it was warm enough to.  We are getting really independent and more confident in the water; learning how to float, trying our faces in the water, jumping in to deeper water, practicing flutter kicks and scooping with our arms.  We even got to try a neat water train with our class by holding onto each other’s noodles and floating all the way into the deep end! 

That’s the story of our month!

Love,

Katharine and Christopher

February 2014

February was a month of indoor fun!

The snow gave us lots of opportunities to be together at home this month!

We had a puzzle day one morning, helping put together ALL of our puzzles. 

For Valentine’s Day we helped make chocolate covered strawberry hearts and pretzels, for our teachers and for Kristy’s family.

We had fun preparing and exchanging Valentines at school, and playing with our friends at church, and at swim class. 

We played outside in the snow together, helped shovel the driveway and sidewalk, fed the birds, and then enjoyed some well-earned hot chocolate and pumpkin pancake hearts inside!  J

One day was nice enough to head into DC to the Air and Space Museum to explore. We tried lots of experiments, listened to story time, and tried a new craft, and saw lots of really neat airplanes and space ships.

At the end of the month, we became enchanted with Mommy’s childhood teddy bear, who plays “Rockabye Baby”, and the story about how he lost one of his eyes.  We were so sad for him that he was missing an eye, that we helped mommy look for new bear eyes online.  We assisted in Teddy’s surgery, and decided it would be best to leave his existing eye in place, so as not to cause him additional distress.  We even made get well cards for him and made sure he was comfortable in his recovery.

That’s the story of our month!  We hope you enjoy the photos below!

Love

Christopher and Katharine

February 2014

February 2014, a set on Flickr.

January 2014

January has come and gone!  Here is an overview!

Christopher and Katharine are loving their big-kid bed setups, and are doing a great job.  They’re also enjoying their first big-kid swim class, where they get to swim without Mommy and Daddy. 

On a healthy weekend, we enjoyed going in to the Museum of Natural History to explore, and had a great time eating lunch out and riding the train.

Christopher’s constipation issues did find us indoors for several weekends, pursuing cleanout treatments. In the end, we finally received a fully successful result, and are now working with the GI specialist to get back on the road to consistently happy and healthy.  While it could take many months, he is back on the road to normal, and we are so grateful for this.  And both kids are happy that he’s back at school on a regular basis!

While health and weather caused several interruptions to our regular schedule and events, we enjoyed lots of extra family time together, either indoors or out.  We watched a lot of DVD’s on sick days, enjoyed playing together, working on Valentines surprises, and yes – playing in the snow!  And all this together time has resulted in lots of silly fun, and even stronger friendships between the best of buds.  So thankful for the way Mother Nature provides us time together! 

We hope you had a wonderful start to 2014, and can’t wait to share our February adventures.  Here are our photos from this month!

Love,

Christopher and Katharine

January 2014

January 2014, a set on Flickr.

New Year's Day Post - Catching Up!

-->

Happy New Year to all our friends and family!   

As I snuggle up to the laptop following all of our holiday festivities, I realize how very long it has been since I sat down to complete a post.

In reflection, I realize the era of detailed posts may behind us for the time being.  With this realization, I will at least plan to keep photos shared on a more regular basis!

Here is a synopsis of what you will enjoy in the September through December galleries (posted below):

We celebrated Mommy’s 40^th birthday with dinner out and biking at Clydes’ Willow Creek restaurant.  And we celebrated Mommy and Daddy’s birthdays by sharing special desserts at home!

We started going to our new school at Holy Comforter!  We love playing with our friends in our class, and are learning about the letters of the alphabet, sharing, baking, making crafts, science, chapel, show and share, and lots of fun songs.

We have also been enjoying getting to play with our friends Emmie, Jordan, and Alex (Kristy’s children).  We love some of the fun special activities we do together, like trips to play together; choosing, painting, and carving pumpkins; science experiments and art projects at home; creating our own stories, and going to a play.

We did lots of playing this fall at home and outside!  When it’s nice outside, we love hike, ride our bikes, swim, play at the park, and play in the yard.  As the weather got colder, we did lots more helping Mommy in the kitchen and crafts at home, as well as trying out some “indoor camping” fun with Daddy.  We also like taking trips to the library, the store, and to Mommy’s school.

We enjoyed lots of special outings this fall to concerts, Cox Farms Fall Festival, the Fire Station Open House, the Fall For Fairfax festival, and leaf and light peeping at Meadowlark Gardens.

Halloween was lots of fun this year!  We had a great time helping decorate the house with pumpkins and spiders, and dressing up and going out for our first Trick-Or-Treat!  We had so much fun dressing up as Rock Stars, with our blow-up guitars.  We even got to wear them for the multiples Halloween Party, and for our school’s costume parade!

We celebrated giving thanks the entire month of November by remembering all of our friends and family members, using the “Giving Thanks” calendar we helped Mommy make.  And we took an extra special family trip to Sesame Place in Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving weekend.  We were amazed to see our Sesame Street friends in shows, in a parade, and on the street.  We thought it was fabulous to visit Elmo in Elmo’s World – we got to play his piano and say Hi to Dorothy!  And we even got to meet and take pictures with some of our favorite characters!

This Christmas was also extra special!  We enjoyed helping decorate our home with lights, nativity, Christmas Trees, and watching new greeting cards from family and friends go up each day.  Each morning, we loved seeing where “Advent” the elf had moved to, talking about the daily ornament from our church for our Advent tree, and advancing the date on our Advent calendar.  We enjoyed seeing Santa on his fire truck at the Church Street Holiday Stroll, and having dinner with Santa at Meadowlark Gardens, where we also got to explore the lights with our friends Emmie, Jordan, and Alex.   We went with Emmie to a gingerbread house decorating party which was SO much fun!  And we had a great time helping Mommy make ornaments for our tree, stockings and gingerbread for our teachers, cookies for exchange, “Snow Dough”, and lots of other fun crafts at home.  We had some extra fun time together at home during our snow and ice days – we sledded, made snow angels, and a great big snowman!

For Mommy’s school Winter Concert, we got to sit front and center, and loved singing the songs around our home.  And we were very proud to be in our very own first Christmas concert at school, where we sang “One Little, Two Little, Three Little Reindeer,” and “Have You Ever Seen A Reindeer?”, with our friends.

The best part of all, of course, was our visit with our families in Ohio!  We loved celebrating Christmas, and seeing Grandma and Grandpa Sturgeon and Grandma and Grandpa Keller, and playing with our cousins, Katie, Sam, Clara, and Joseph!  We love them so much and look forward to seeing everyone again soon!

Back at home, we ended 2013 by spending our very first night in our big kids beds on New Year’s Eve!  We did great and are so proud and excited about a new big kids year ahead of us!

Welcome 2014!  Sending love and hugs from the VA Kellers to all our family and friends!

Love,

Christopher and Katharine

December 2013

December 2013, a set on Flickr.