Merry Christmas (Christmas Day version)

For Christmas we had a delicious meal of Caesar salad, rice pudding and steak. Mmm.

Addilyn didn't care much for the rice pudding. This is probably the only bite she tried.

Erin made some DELICIOUS french silk pie for desert.

Afterwards we took this picture. Then we opened presents. More on that in a later blog.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Merry Christmas

Here's a little taste of the true meaning of Christmas from arguably the worst movie ever made.

Snow in Houston

Houston is a little weird. For one, Christmas is supposed to be 75 degrees and rainy. Yuck. Snow is once-every-four-years rare. It snowed the other day and we really enjoyed it, but it didn't really change our evening. The snow started around 7pm one night. We watched it for a while and then went to bed. The next morning there were snowmen everywhere and I'm pretty sure every kid in the city was up until midnight playing in the snow in the dark. Never even occurred to us that it likely wouldn't happen again for years. A few nights later we went to look at Christmas lights. Living in the fourth largest city in the US makes this a daunting task. A website listed some of the more impressive displays and we chose a neighborhood that was a little far, but supposedly worth a drive. Once we got to the area we noticed that traffic was backed up and there were many police lights. It turns out that when you look at Christmas lights in the city you must park your car and walk through the neighborhoods. Since Addilyn was already asleep we drove home. Weird.


Here are a couple of videos to slake your Addilyn thirst. The first an attempt of a somersault. The second is one of her new favorite games. Riding on Daddy.







Merry Christmas to all of you and if you have snow and don't enjoy it I'll find that to be quite offensive.

Oh Christmas Tree

We went to get our Christmas tree this past Saturday. It was a little different trip than last year in Maryville (no sleet, no coats). In fact, it was whole new experience to be driving along with a tree strapped to your roof and the A/C on. Again I say, Texas is weird.

Nonetheless, we got our tree and spent Saturday evening decorating it. Addilyn was a happy helper throughout the process.

Here she's helping Daddy arrange the lights.


And here she is participating in her first assembly line. Tyler would get out the ornaments and attach the hangers, then Addilyn would bring them to me to put on the tree. She seemed to enjoy her role immensely.


So here is the finished product.

Little Drummer Girl

Thanksgivingness

Hello everyone. I've decided to change things up a bit in this post. Instead of writing the usual much-too-long entry detailing all of our adventures up north over the last week and a half (as we have for every major vacation or holiday since the inception of this blog), I will retell this near fortnight (again, much too verbosely) in reverse order. It's a brilliant idea that will hopefully breathe life into the lackluster blog (ignore the fact that the pictures were uploaded in reverse order and I'm too lazy to reorganize them; this is really a breakthrough idea!!).

So let's get started! Here I am at the very end of our 10 day trip. As you can tell, I look relatively happy and am thoroughly enjoying my car ride due to a new companion in the form of Daddy's old monkey friend. This monkey even comes with it's own monkey puppet. It's like two toys in one!

The last three days of our trip were spent at G & G Johnson's house. Here Daddy is helping Grandpa set up the Christmas tree on Saturday. I really enjoyed looking at the tree. Although I'm still a little confused as to why I keep getting yelled at for trying to grab the balls off of it. I thought balls were for throwing and kicking, not looking at.

I really enjoyed playing with G & G Johnson and Aunt Kendall. Here I am playing on the floor with Grandpa J.

On Friday we had Thanksgiving dinner number two for our family (number one for the rest of the Johnson clan). My favorite part: the stuffing!

On Thursday we celebrated with the Butts' at Thanksgiving dinner number 1. We actually got to spend Monday evening through Thursday lunch with them in Kearney. This picture is after the meal. I look happy and not about to go pass out so I figure the meal was a success.

Thanksgiving meal numero uno was a bit different than your typical Thanksgiving feast. It involved steak and baked potatoes (not to mention cheesy green beans). It was satisfying and delicious nonetheless.

So this is Belle, G & G Butts' basset hound. I didn't know what to think of her at first (because, let's be honest, she's bigger than me and could easily eat me in just a couple of bites), but after a few days I got fairly comfortable with her. In fact, at one point I even tried to ride her (much to Daddy's delight).

So we discovered this trip that I don't really enjoy sleeping away from home (especially since the first 4 nights of our trip were in different houses). I guess it's all the changes, but I really put up a fuss when Mommy and Daddy put me to bed or down for a nap. With all of that fighting and screaming, I wore out pretty quickly which resulted in some interesting sleeping positions. When Daddy found me napping as pictured below, he said that it looked like I was dead.

So before we got to G & G Butts' house, we went through Great G & G Diamonds for a day, Manhattan (which included stops at the K-State game, Java, and the Floersch's house), and a very quick stop at G & G Johnson's (we got there near midnight and left around 10 the next morning).

That brings us back to Seabrook before our trip. Other than a lot of packing and a crazy 18-hour work day for Daddy, the days leading up to our trip were fairly uneventful. I mostly played and laid around as illustrated in the picture below. I thought the little red wagon was sufficiently comfortable for my pretend nap, but Mommy and Daddy marvelled at my ability to enjoy a cold, metal bed. I don't see what the issue is really. Maybe Mommy and Daddy are just getting too old to enjoy sleeping wherever they please. Too bad; it's pretty fun.

As it is well past my bedtime, I will say, "Night, night." Maybe later this week I can post some of the videos taken on our journey through the plains.

Until then,

Addilyn Elise