It's HOLIDAY SEASON...!!

Usually, Christmas totally sneaks up on me. Thanksgiving will come and go and then WHAM! I barely have time to get the tree up before Christmas is here. This year, as soon as Halloween was over, we were totally focused on Christmas. Maybe it's because we have a 4-yr old in the house. Maybe it's because the cold weather hit suddenly this year, or maybe it's just one of those things.

Before we even got to Thanksgiving, I'm finding myself thinking of where we're going to put the tree, what presents to give, what holiday shows and movies we can go to, and what to put in our annual newsletter. Our 4-yr old has been writing and re-writing her Christmas list and has it ready to go. For those of you who are interested, our family's Christmas lists are in the "Christmas" document you can access on the right side of the website.

Between the snow sprinkle yesterday and another one overnight we had enough to go out and play for a bit this morning. In order to gather enough snow to make snowballs (at Layla's request) we had to shovel the ENTIRE driveway. After a good snowball fight and some general running around in the snow, we came in and had some really excellent hot chocolate from our favorite neighborhood chocolate factory in Seattle, Theo Chocolate.

Derek shows Layla how to make a snowball from their little pile of snow gathered from shoveling the entire driveway

My favorite kind of hot chocolate - from Theo Chocolate with cinnamon and cayenne!! So yummy.