Halloween

In between posts on the new house, I thought I would throw in some of Miles.  Here is Halloween with a 2 year old

 Wow.  Wrangling 20 kids on Halloween is a lot of work.  Thank you preschool teachers

 Here we are trick or treating at Tully's.  Miles is in there somewhere.  He is the Engineer Driver

 Okay here is the sitting still picture before we explore our new neighborhood.  When I was asking Miles what he wanted to be for Halloween, I told him that engineers drive trains and did he want to be an engineer.  He interpreted that to mean that the front of the train was an engineer so he decided he wanted to be an engineer driver.

Here we are in the new neighborhood.  

Christmas

We were really looking forward to celebrating Christmas at home this year. It's nice to have your child sleep in his own bed, wake up in familiar surroundings and then see that something is different at the Christmas tree. Here is Miles' experience.


Everything is set up for optimum viewing when Miles wakes up.

Here, he is seeing things for the first time. Let me explain the picture a little. In the morning, it is cold in our house so we bought Miles some slippers to wear in the mornings. Everything was going great until Miles needed a new pair of school shoes and we bought him some new sneakers. Now, every morning he insists on putting his shoes on. On Christmas morning, I asked Miles if he wanted his house shoes on. He agreed until he saw I was talking about the slippers. As a compromise, Miles offered his chicken wear the house shoes and he would wear his sneakers.

Don't worry, Scooter got presents too. He got a catnip pillow with big eyes on it. Miles took one look at it and deemed it an owl.

Here we are going through his stocking. The first thing he pulled out was raisins and he wasn't really interested in it after that. Taking everything else out of the stocking was a bit of a chore to be done in between bites of raisins.

The family in our new pajamas.

Miles got balls from the grandparents. He likes to try to carry all of them. Here, he is carrying three, but at one point, he had all four in his hands/arms.

By far, his two favorite presents were the legos and...

A race car track. Thanks again grandparents!

Miles meets Santa

I forgot to post this earlier. This is Miles' first time meeting Santa. We were waiting in line and Miles kept calling him Satan. Miles also calls the Christmas Tree the "Gimme Tee". His stocking is "tockin".

So, we are thinking of not really talking about Santa to Miles. I don't really want that to be the focus of the holiday and want to instead emphasize the celebration of the birth of Christ. Any thoughts?

Decorating for Christmas

Here are a few pictures of us decorating for Christmas this year. I was expecting the worst with a toddler, but things have been okay...so far.


It's important to us that Miles learn about the story of the birth of Jesus and that being the reason we celebrate Christmas so we got him a nativity scene made by lego. Miles loves playing with it.

He also loves wearing his monkey hat. The hat has nothing to do with Christmas, but it's cute.

When we pulled out the Christmas tree, it poked Miles so he was afraid of it from the beginning. Here he is playing with a garland while Steve and I decorate the tree.

Miles finally got familiar enough with the tree to touch the ornaments, but not the tree (it still pokes). This has actually made Christmas really nice because I don't have to worry about Miles playing with the tree and having it fall on him. I think next year I will give him the job of keeping the cat away from the tree.

The magic of Christmas as seen from little eyes.

snow

Right before Thanksgiving, Seattle got a snow storm (unheard of). This may not seem to bad to friends in family in Utah, but this much snow shuts down the city and turns my commute from 20 minutes to 3 hours. At least Steve stayed home with Miles so I didn't have a toddler on the bus. Here are some pictures of Miles enjoying snow.


Miles likes things orderly. Here he is cleaning the tree.

Steve taught Miles how to catch snow on his tongue

Halloween

Miles gets to go trick or treating with his classmates to some of the local businesses. Miles was dressed as angry elephant this year.


A few members of the class getting ready to go out. They have a rope with rings that they hold on to.

Fran's Chocolates was our favorite place to trick or treat. They gave the kids boring candy, but gave the adults a chocolate ganache. Yummm!!

Celebrating Christmas

Here are a few pictures of Miles celebrating his first Christmas season.

On December 5th everyone puts one shoe out in hopes that St. Nicolas will come and fill their shoe with treats and/or prizes. This year, St. Nicolas left Miles some pear yogurt. He was thrilled.

Miles posing in front of the Christmas tree. It took putting the camera on action shots and bribing Miles with an ornament to get this photo.

I think Miles wants a laptop for Christmas. We opened up our old laptop for him to play with.

Catching up on Thanksgiving

I never caught everyone up on my Turkey Trot run. It was a drizzly cold morning, but we went out anyway. I decided to listen to Bon Jovi for my run. I told myself I needed to run for 9 songs to finish. I paced myself well and things were going great until song number 7. I thought, "there is no way I can keep running for three more songs", so I stopped to walk, but then I heard cheering and figured I must be close to the finish line so I started to run again. I finished the race in just over 7 Bon Jovi songs. Even though I didn't run the entire race, I still consider it a victory because I signed up, trained, and ran most of it.

The rest of the Thanksgiving day was very nice. Steve's sister Jennifer came to visit and we had Thanksgiving Dinner with our friends. As it was Miles' first Thanksgiving, I gave him bits of dinner to try. He had turkey, mashed potatoes, rolls, and stuffing and he loved all of it. Here are some pictures.

Another thing Miles and Scooter can bond over. Turkey

Miles had to wear his pig bib for the big day

Everything was beautiful and delicious.