Bits and Pieces of our Holiday Season

We had quite a fun holiday season despite the distance between ourselves and most of our family. It's difficult to keep up with picture posting when you are in the thick of the season, so I just recently went back through our photos to pick out the highlights to share with you.

We spent Thanksgiving Day in Tacoma with our dear close family, Laura (David's sister) and Gray. The day was cold, but gorgeous, and we even spent a little time along the Ruskin Way waterfront playing and enjoying the sunset before our delicious dinner meal.

Laura took this photo of the 3 of us and we ended up choosing it for our Christmas card this year. Loved the color and the slight spotting of Mt. Rainier in the background.

We have been to the same tree lot each year since moving here to pick out our tree. I keep thinking we would have fun going to an actual tree farm to cut it down, but this year with the shortened time between Thanksgiving and Christmas we didn't have any time to fit in that type of outing. We still had fun and our tree was a perfect fit for our ornaments.

Jack and I also had a lot of eating, I mean building, fun with his first gingerbread house. We also made Christmas cookies and ate our fair share of other holiday treats!

We had fun with our Christmas pups- our own whom we torture every year with the silly antlers- and Laura and Gray's new puppy, Whidbey, who shared our holiday.

Christmas Day was a blast with Jack's infectious joy and wonderment! We snuck in a quick photo in the early morning hours before we descended our stairs to see if a special one paid a visit! Jack loved all of his new toys (He was very much into figurines for pretend play this year and I think he collected about 45 new ones on Christmas morning!); he was entertained and fully involved in his imagination all day long- he didn't even change out of his new Christmas pjs!

Finally, we rang in the New Year (East Coast time- one of the many benefits of living on the West Coast, especially when you have young children, is that things happen earlier on the other coast so we can just jump right in with the celebrating!) with this fun group of radiology co-residents and their families.

Beginning on New Year's Day, I made a commitment to myself to live more in the moment, to stop worrying about future days that may seem bleak or difficult, and to just enjoy the here and now or to focus on getting through the difficult issue when it's actually happening. I know this is terribly cliche, but I have to tell you, it's really working! And, it's completely life changing! I just hope I can keep up with this type of focus and presence as the year unfolds.

So, I will leave you with this last photo taken on New Year's Day at a rad little spot we found in Queen Anne - Citizen Coffee. It nicely captures the description of my new attitude- just close your eyes when you need to shut out the bad stuff (like having to wait for your crepe lunch) and the next moment will likely be a better one (like when your apple and pear crepe is delivered and drenched with caramel sauce and whip cream)!