Christmas Photos

Every year, Knoll provides this awesome opportunity for local designers and architects to bring their families to get Christmas photos taken with Santa.  This year, they hosted it at their Knoll Showroom in Tempe, and they had lots of snacks, hot cocoa and coffee, a crafts room for the kids, in addition to taking your Christmas photos for you for free.  It is such a better alternative to getting photos with Santa at a crazy mall, and they always provide a pretty classy backdrop.  Joe helped get Evie ready, he's such the "modern dad", isn't he?  And Evie got to spend some time hanging out with Gola while we waited our turn for the photo shoot.  (We also got Evie's gorgeous holiday dress as a hand-me-down from Gola).

  

Henry Laughing

Love this!  Here is an adorable video of Henry laughing while Joe makes popping noises:

Saturday Fun

Joe took Evie to the park this morning to play and feed the ducks, which she loves.  Henry and I chilled at home, and he took a nap.  This evening, we watched a movie using our projector, (Evie calls it "the big screen").  It was a really nice, fun Saturday!

Veteran's Day Parade

Since Joe doesn't get Veteran's Day as a holiday, we invited our friend and past-neighbor, Jennifer, to join us.  Jennifer is really fun with the kids and her and Evie have a special relationship.  There were four vintage bi-planes that flew over, signalling the start of the parade, so cool!  The weather was really beautiful, sunny and warm, just a great morning to go see a parade.  The kids were really well-behaved which made it much easier than previous parade experiences.  Evie really enjoyed watching the parade and waving her flag around, and Henry was content to sit in the stroller for most of it.  We stayed for about 90 minutes of the parade, and left when the kids were starting to get a bit restless and it was time for lunch.  We had so much fun!!

Local First Arizona Fall Festival

There was a free fall festival downtown this weekend, we decided to check it out.  Evie has been wanting to ride the lightrail trail for a long time now, so this was a perfect opportunity.  The train was pretty crowded, but Evie loved it!!  The festival was also pretty crowded but there was lots of food from local restaurants and it was fun to just walk around, Evie got to enjoy the inflated bounce house, and the weather was gorgeous.

Fun at Target

Sometimes Joe takes Evie to Target, just the two of them, to pick up a couple of things, and to give me a break from Evie and running errands.  They usually do a lot of goofing around too, and have a lot of fun together!  Here Evie is trying on a post-Halloween witches hat.

Herberger Festival of The Arts

There was a practically-free Festival of the Arts event at the Herberger Theater this weekend, and I wanted to go.  Joe, not so much.  So I took Evie, and Joe and Henry dropped us off downtown and went to do their own thing, picking us up about 90 minutes later.  It was really fun to spend some time just with Evie, and they had some kids activities, theater performances, and live music.  Evie especially enjoyed the couple of dance performances that we got to watch.  We had so much fun!

Miscellaneous October Photos

This month has brought a bunch of super fun fall activities for us to share with the kiddos, and we've had lots of fun with them at home, too.  Henry has been standing up every chance he gets, which bugs Evie to no end, especially when he's touching her rocking chair.  Evie has been doing great in school, and her language skills seem to be really developing.  She loves singing, and playing with Daddy whenever she can.  They have so much fun together!  We got away one evening to see a concert with our friends Charlie & Christy, while my sweet cousins, Jennifer & Kelsey stayed with the kiddos.  It's been a great October!

Halloween Trick-Or-Treating

Steve and Sophia joined us again this year for trick-or-treating, this time in our new neighborhood.  The girls had a lot of fun getting lots of candy from our neighbors, and Henry enjoyed riding around in the stroller for the event.  After we had gone around the block, we parked ourselves on some chairs in our driveway and the girls played around on the front lawn, with Evie's slide and playhouse that we had moved out there just for the night.  Then our friends, Charlie and Christy, joined us and we all had a great time handing out candy to the kids.  There were even a few kids that decided to try out our slide, which was fun.