Anna Grows

It was a whirlwind Christmas this year! The main whirlwind revolved around the completion of the kitchen renovation. It ended up not being so much complete but rather operational. The second big event of the holidays was the arrival of Grandma and Grandpa who joined in the Christmas festivities AND the kitchen renovation. The third big event was Anna's Christmas pagent at school. The kitchen renovation went right down to the wire with everything operational the night before Grandma and Grandpa arrived (the tile backsplace and cabinet knobs/handles still need to be added....maybe next week). As a result, the house remained a construction zone with few Christmas decorations to be found. Thanks to a lot of help from Grandma and Grandpa, everything got unpacked and the Christmas tree went up! Grandma and Grandpa had quite a busy week. They arrived Tuesday morning after a flight delay just in time to see Anna in the Christmas pagent (Anna got to g o up on stage along with the o

The holidays are here at last! While this year's Christmas season is dominated about completion of the kitchen renovation (the Christmas gift that will keep on giving for years to come), we did manage to take a beautiful day off from the remodal work to enjoy some of the many great holiday activities Washington has to offer. We made our way dowtown to the Botanical Gardens for the annual train display. This activity has clearly grown in popularity as we had to wait for 30 minutes just to get in. The wait was worth it as once again they had a spectacular train display (complete with Thomas the Train) along with beautiful flowers and replicas of the various monuments around DC. After lunch at the Native American history museum, we headed over to the White House to check out the Christmas tree display. This year was a disappointment to say the least. The tree was more of a Charley Brown tree (lights were lying in a pool around the bottom because the tree was so much shorter than in pr