Happy Thanksgiving!

We started our day out with an 8 K turkey trot.  Ela loved the Turkey.

The runners did great!

Now on to the food!

Colonial Williamsburg

Over the Veteran's Day weekend, Colonial Williamsburg offered free admission to all active duty military and their dependants. That comibined with a super good deal on a hotel room convinced us to go down and check it out. On the way, we stopped and picked up Zack's sister. We had a crazy night in the hotel room (Ela decided to skip sleep), and got up early enough to be there when the gates opened.
We were all very impressed with the people who worked there.  Every place we stopped, they were informative and intesting.  We found ourselves wanting to stay and hear more at every stop, but Ela kept us moving.  At the court house, we heard three mock trials. Amanda even got to be a judge.

We also visited the shoemaker, the weavers, a blacksmith and a silver worker, among others.  Ela's favorite part was the animals.  There were horses, sheep, and even two baby cows.

We had lunch at a tavern on the main road in town.  I had a really yummy peanut soup.  I've since found the recipe on the Colonial Williamsburg website.  I made a pretty good replica this week.  I'm curious to try a few others from the site, too. 
After lunch, there were lots of little reinactments in the streets.  We grown ups enjoyed watching the actors, while the kids found their own entertainment. 

 

At the end of the day, Zack marched in a Veteran's Day Parade down the main road.  It was a beautiful day that went by very quickly.   We had a fantastic trip.

Mommy Tales

We've been traveling and having so much fun lately, I haven't had a lot of time to remind the world that I have the cutest daughters ever.

 

See? Cute, right?   For evidence of Ela's cuteness, check previous posts, or just read some of these stories.

Ela is at an age where she says something funny about every thiry seconds. I almost always forget what she's said before I have a chance to write it down or share with the world.  For example, today she visited me in the bathroom while I was getting dressed to inform me that I was the big Mommy, and she was the little Ela.  I have no idea where this came from, but I was amused.
Ela loves Dora the Explorer.  Since we have netflix, I let her choose which episode she watches, and while she hasn't picked up any Spanish, she has learned a few things about the world from them.  One of her favorite episodes is a story called "Catch the Babies."  In this episode, one of Dora's challenges is to find three apples to feed a horse so the horse will move and let Dora pass.  About every morning for breakfast she eats an apple. The apple always leads to the same train of thought for her.  She says "Ela wants apple.  Horses eat apples.  Ela wants to watch Dora catch the babies."  I love listening to how her mind works.
While Ela hasn't picked up any Spanish, she is learning a little Japanese at the moment.  One of her current favorite books is one that my students in Japan gave me when she was born.  It is about animal sounds and which animals make which sounds. I read the Japanese to her and then translate.  She's reached a point now where she repeats the animal names back to me, and she won't tell me the animals in English, even though I know she knows them.  She seems determined to figure out the strange words.  It's interesting. 

Lily is at a disadvantage when it comes to cute stories since she's still learning the basics.  She's still precious (as evidenced by the picture) there's just less to tell.  She's recently learned to sit up on her own, and so she spends a lot of time sitting in places playing with whatever toy I can convince Ela to let her hold onto.  She's teething, so everything goes in her mouth.  Lately, she's been making some great smacking sounds, playing with the new teeth. 
Lily is also a little Daddy's girl.  She lights up whenever she sees him.  One of my favorite things about her is that she can smile and cry at the same time, and often does.  It's like she doesn't know how to stop smiling for long enough to tell us she's sad.  It's funny. 

So we're enjoying our happy girls and taking a little rest this week after the busy month of October.  More stories to follow. 

Treats and Tricks

Our neighborhood is not exactly one that inspires trust, at least after dark.  In fact, my husband says we live in the ghetto.  I disagree.  It's really a very nice place to live, with good people all around.  It's just a neighborhood in the middle of a big city, and as such it's a little less safe than, say, the average suburb.  I feel perfectly safe playing with the girls outside all day long.  However, I think twice about going anywhere alone after dark.  This says much more about DC than it does about my neighbors. 

All the same, last year for Halloween, I decided to take Ela to North Carolina to trick-or-treat.  I did this for several reasons, one of which was that I didn't want to knock on strangers' door in DC.  I felt much more comfortable doing so in my parents' neighborhood, where at least they all knew each other.  It was Ela's first trip out, and I didn't want anything scary to happen.

This year, I decided to give DC a chance.  I know a few more people in my neighborhood, and I didn't figure that Ela would be up for a big run anyway, so I made plans to go out with Ela's best friend, Audrey, who lives up the street.  Zack found out last week that he'd be on a business trip, so I felt better going with at least one other adult.  We'd hit a few houses and call it a day.  After all, people do trick-or-treat here. I didn't want to be totally snooty when I know and like people around here and trust them to help my girls celebrate a fun holiday. 

So Halloween arrived and I managed to convince Ela to put on a costume.  She chose her lady bug one:

In the time it took me to get Lily into her outfit...

... Ela was ready to take the costume off again, but then I reminded her that we were going trick-or-treating (which she'd seen on Dora the Explorer), and that (more importantly) Audrey would be there, and she stuck it out until we got outside, only insisting on losing the headband.

We left the house around 5:45, with plans to meet a bigger group at six for a short trip up a few streets.  We met Princess Audrey at her house and then the rest of the group at a playground, which was nice because the girls got to play on the equipment before we headed out. 

As it turns out, Ela liked trick or treating this year.  She said the right words, and got her candy, and insisted on carrying her own bag.  She loved all of it except getting down steps, which was hard because she couldn't see her feet in her tutu.  We were out for roughly an hour, and it was getting dark when she announced that she was getting tired and wanted to go home.  As we were on our way home at the time, it worked out perfectly.  It was a super experience.  I was very glad I had decided to stay in the area.

I sent Ela inside with a piece of candy (her only one for the night) while I waited on the porch for another neighbor friend who was coming by to trick or treat, since we'd bought candy before I knew Zack wouldn't be home.  His mom was watching him from across the street.  Audrey and her mom were still hitting a few houses on our street.  I saw a police car pull up at the end of our street.  That alone didn't phase me. I'd seen them out and about while we were trick-or-treating, and I actually like that they were so visible on a night that begs for minor mischief.  Then I saw the cop come running down our street from the car.  That was when I decided it was probably time to call it a night.

Apparently, my neighbor decided the same thing, because she started hurring her son along. I met him on the sidewalk with a handful of candy and walked back up to the house to close up shop.  I was closing myself in the house when Fiona called.  She had just gotten home with Audrey and she informed me that the owner of one of the houses she and Audrey had been visiting on their way home had called the cops I'd seen.  Some men had been doing some work for him in his back yard and were held up at gunpoint. 

See? I knew there was a reason we didn't trick or treat in DC last year.

So I turned off the porch light, locked the doors, and pretended we weren't home.  I bathed the girls, and put them to bed, and when I came back downstairs, there was a cop car parked right outside the house.  I figured that meant I was pretty safe to take the dog out one more time, so I did.  My neighbor across the street informed me that they had put up crime scene tape at the end of our block.  I thanked her for the information, and hurried the dog back inside.  Then I set the alarm for the night.

Nothing else out of the ordinary happened, but I was glad we did our trick or treating earlier rather than later.   I'm also glad that next year we'll be in Cary, where the odds of running into a mugging are much much lower.