Before Christmas

 I forgot to post this.  The Monday before Christmas, I took my Mom up to see Kari's new house.  While we were there, Annika was decorating her favorite stuffed animal "Itty Bit" with ribbons, so she would be ready for Christmas.  She added her briefly to one of Kari's Christmas decoration displays, then she took all the ribbons off and redid them.

We got Great-grandma to play a game with us for awhile also.

A Special Christmas Gift and Card

This is a 2 part picture that Annika made for me for a Christmas Present.  This is the first part of the picture, which shows the 2 of us holding hands...

...and this was underneath the first picture.  I love it when she makes pictures for me.

Seth made us a Christmas card, this is the front of the card...

 ...and this was the inside of it.  This is one of my favorite Christmas cards!

Christmas Day

 Can you see Seth hiding behind the tree?

 Annika wore her new gloves/mittens to our house and wore them while she looked at the things she had in her "Christmas stocking" sack from Great Grandma.

 Opening gifts in their stockings.

 Todd and Saben both wanted "Calvin and Hobbs" books.  Todd was showing Saben that he got one, but later Saben was able to show Todd that he got 3 to Todd's 1.

 Annika loves these stuffed animals with big eyes, called "Beanie Boos" and is collecting them.  They come in different sizes and lots of different animals.  We ordered this one for her on Nov. 19th and waited and waited for it to arrive.  The shipping info showed it sitting in Oregon for a long time, then it finally moved, but it went to Alaska instead of to Washington!  It finally arrived at our house on Dec. 18, so it took almost a month to arrive. 

 We had our usual Christmas dinner of seafood cioppino.  Everyone else got done and we got most of the table cleaned up, while Kari continued to eat her cioppino.

 We opened the rest of the Christmas presents after dinner.

 Seth perched on Todd's chair to see what he was getting...

 ...while Saben made himself a crown.

 Lots of presents for everyone.

 Saben got an ammo vest for his Nerf bullets.

 Seth was pleased to get a large Lego set.

 Annika modeled the new shirt she got from Great Grandma.

 Saben also got a remote-control vehicle that shoots Nerf bullets.

 Annika also got some chalk to color her hair.  She tried to do it herself...

 ...then had Kari put it on for her.

Playing with the Nerf vehicle.  We ended the gift giving with a scavenger hunt for the kids, where they had to follow clues to find their last gift, which was tickets to go to a play, "Mary Poppins" with us in January.

Christmas Eve

 Presents under the tree and...

...Christmas stockings ready for the next day.

Elliott Family Christmas

 Last Saturday was the annual Elliott family Christmas get-together.  This is just part of the gang, I counted 15 adults, and 8 younger ones, (with another one on the way).  Amy tried to take the big box of candy, but I stole it back from her, so that everyone could have some!

 It gets to be quite a houseful, when everyone is there.  If our kids and their families, plus Matt, who had worked the night before and was sleeping during the party, had come, there would be 20 adults and 11 young ones.

 Gabe, Denaye and their 2 boys.

Jayden and Kiera are waiting patiently to unwrap gifts.

 Shaun and Liam snuggling before lunch.

 Sadie and a snowman.

 Time to open gifts!

 Sadie, trying on her new "Frozen" slippers.

 Caleb being made to say "thank you" for his new drum set, that made him forget to say "thank you" because it was so exciting!

 Kiera got really excited when she saw that she had gotten some hair chalk.

 Mom and her oldest great-granddaughter.

 Sadie's new shirt.

 Jayden helping to organize the adults gifts.

After the gifts were opened, we played "Chinese Checkers", which was a gift that Melia got.

A Stop in Leavenworth

On our way to Wenatchee last Friday, we stopped in Leavenworth.  We thought their website had said that they would be doing their tree lighting ceremony on Friday evening, but we found out later that they only do it on Sat. and Sun nights.

Even thought there wasn't the official tree lighting, the lights on the trees and buildings were on and we enjoyed walking around the town for a while.

 This was a big snowflake on one of the trees.

 Standing in snow in front of the tree with the snowflakes.

I liked the way this hotel was decorated with lights on all the levels of the hotel.

Ken's Birthday - Part 3

 After looking at the Zoo Lights, we headed to the UW district because there was another area there that had a lot of houses with Christmas lights on them.  We also needed to get some dinner and Kyle and Kari had recommended this place in the U Village that makes Taiwanese dumplings.  We tried to get in, but it was going to be a 30 minute wait and we were really hungry and didn't want to wait that long.  I took this picture of them working on making the dumplings though because I thought it was really cool to see them working on the dumplings with everyone wearing a face mask and a hat.

 The area that we went to after dinner wasn't far from the UW area and it's called "Candy Cane Lane".  I liked the Santa in the doorway in this one.

 Another pretty house and several other beyond it.  There was only one house on the street that didn't have any lights on it.  I wonder if "The Cranks" lived there!

 At the top of the street there was a traffic circle that was decorated also, with lit train figures going around like a merry-go-round.

 That's before I was born...

 A sign to show the traffic which was to go.  Because we were there on a Monday night, there wasn't that much traffic, but I've heard that on the weekends, traffic can be really bad to get to go down the street.

 Two more nicely decorated houses.

Tuesday morning, we headed over to Seattle Center and saw an IMAX movie at the Science center about building the railroad across the Canadian Rockies.  It amazes me what people went through back then to build railroads, etc. with no machinery, just using hand tools and their bare hands and in terrible weather conditions.  So many men lost their lives doing it also, that I can't believe men kept coming to help with it.  The movie was very well done and we thoroughly enjoyed it.