November 2014

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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