Happy Holidays!

Wow.
It's been awhile since my last post. We've been busy with the holidays and I just can't seem to pull myself away from Facebook.com.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving this year. We traveled up to Santa's Village and spent our annual weekend away with Johanna's side of the family. We love the traditional getaway with them. We got ina trip to Santa's Village which was a blast. Plus it was snowy and winter wonderlandish when we were there. PERFECT!

We've also had some snow of our own since Thanksgiving. We've had 2 sizable snow storms. The first we had easily over a foot of snow. The second was more recent with about 8 inches.



This is the week following Christmas and we all have off. Johanna had about 2 weeks off and I had the week between Christmas and New Years. It's been great spending all this time together asa family. Doing lots of fun activities in and out of the house.

We have a new addition to the family. A gerbil named Hermione (Her-mine-ey). She's Ellie's newest pet. A surprise to her as an after X-mas gift. She's been wanting one but with our holiday travel schedule we weren't able to have Santa deliver it. There's a great pet shop down the street and they helped us pick her out and a cage.



Ellie has recently discovered Harry Potter and loves the character Hermione. Hermione the gerbil has a small white spot on her head. Well, Harry has the scar on his head not Hermione but Ellie determined that the gerbil is a girl and not a boy so she could be Hermione. That's how the name came to be.



Today was a fun day. It's finally not freezing here so we could go ice skating. Providence has a beautiful outdoor rink in it's downtown area. We've been itching to go. Now that Elle is old enough we got her some skates and headed out. We plan to keep at it maybe some classes. She had a good time on the ice and did quite well. She wanted to fall on purpose and sometimes not on purpose. Interestingly enough while saying she couldn't skate all by herself she got her mind off of what she had to do and was able to skate alone. When she didn't think about doing it... she skated without realizing. She got carried away looking at the other kids zipping around.



The rink got busier as the morning went on and Elle's mood dipped just as the recent tempature.
With Johanna's quick thinking we walked over to Citron for lunch. Elle perked right up with some food in her belly and a platter of sorbet. HA! It's vacation!