It’s “This ‘n That: Holiday Edition!” Yaaay!
— 1 —
We flew to Charlotte on Monday to spend time with my family here. We went over to Brian and Cindy’s for dinner on Tuesday, where Emma spent some quality time smooching on her little cousin Thomas.
— 2 —
Then they all came over to my parents’ house on Christmas Eve for dinner. Emma and Lucas had fun playing — it’s so cool to see them interact now that they’re getting older! (They were born less than 24 hours apart so they are literally the same age.)
— 3 —
The kids each opened one present on Christmas Eve. Emma, totally unprompted, said she wanted to open “an Ariel present” and, unbeknownst to her, I had made her an Ariel doll a few days earlier. I gave that bag to open…and she was a fan!
(This picture was taken yesterday morning after she slept with Ariel on Christmas Eve.)
— 4 —
She also had a lot of fun on Christmas morning opening presents and checking out her stocking. (And yes, I totally brought her stocking with us from Houston.)
— 5 —
Gima with 3 of her 4 grandkids
It was fun to have all the kids together for Christmas for the first time! That definitely won’t happen every year, but hopefully we can make it happen again at some point.
— 6 —
After several days of cold rain, it finally cleared up here and was beautiful and sunny for Christmas yesterday! We walked down the street to the park in the afternoon and watched Dan ride his new bike, watched Lucas run around, and threw the frisbee. (Emma was napping.) Jose and I walked around the lake too. There were so many people in the park enjoying their holiday!
— 7 —
On our way back, Jose and I walked through a house being built down the street from my parents and dreamed about buying it. Then I came home and looked it up…and it’s for sale for a cool $1.1 million.
(My parents still live in the house I came home to as an infant, in a neighborhood that was once filled with small bungalows. In the last decade, more and more have been progressively bought up, torn down, and replaced with huuuuge 4,000 square foot homes. They are beautiful, albeit very expensive and usually somewhat too large for the size of the lot.)
$1.1 million! So THAT’S not happening, to say the least! Ha.
