Snow, glorious snow!

We got totally dumped on last Sunday night/Monday morning! It was a great day, as our tube line is mostly outside, it was shut down, all buses were shut down and pretty much the entire population of London had a snow day.




Aidan was very excited to both get to sleep in and to wake up to mom home making snowman pancakes. He decorated it himself with raisins and dried cranberries. Poor kid doesn't even realize that if he pushed us we would have let him use candy instead of dried fruit :)



It was amazing to see all the people out heading to the park in snow kit with sleds(sledges here) in hand. After admiring the snow in our back garden, Aidan and I put on our snow clothes and went to play in the front. Now, notice in the picture below that Aidan has instinctively created a snow angel. We've read the classic kid's book, The Snowy Day, a few times but it was hilarious to see how naturally he realized that fresh snow is made to roll around in.


Aidan was also ready for a good snowball fight. For about a year or so Jamie has played pretend snowball fight with Aidan. I'm not really sure how it came about, but it became one of his favorite things to pretend to gather up snow and then throw it, though he looked more like Ryu throwing his blue fire balls.

Despite all of Aidan's pretend snowball making, he had to have me make most of them. I threw a few at him, which he thought was pretty fun. I can't wait until he's old enough to really pelt him! Ultimately, he was more excited about me putting the biggest piece of snow he could carry in his arms and then eating it.

We ended the day by making one of the worst snowmen ever. Jamie and Zach were both giving me a hard time for my pathetic snowman making skills. In my defense, I did grow up in Central California and saw snow about 4 times in my life before moving to Washington.

Best snow story I heard: my co-small group leader stood out on his balcony at 9:00am on Monday morning and just chucked snowballs at people walking to work. Half threw them back and half were really pissed. Oh, and he's 25. Never grow up people, never grow up :)

Cheers!

Yes, this is a picture of Aidan punching Oliver in the face and Oliver is laughing all the while. I'm sure many of you are feeling like punching us in the face since we haven't blogged in a great long while. I've finally had it with the Microsoft pages, as there seems to be some sort of coding war going on and it is incredibly difficult to use with our Mac. Maybe it is just incredibly difficult to use a Mac, or to use Microsoft pages, or I'm just a difficult person in general. I'm not really sure...

Either way, welcome to our new and improved blog!






2009 had a very fun start to it, with Oliver's first birthday!

Here he is enjoying his one-year old Tiramisu, which has become the traditional 1 year old birthday cake in our household. If two first birthdays counts as tradition. Actually we ended up having three; Oliver got a preemptive birthday party so that all the Hopkins clan could celebrate with him. He then had the second part of Tiramisu on his actually birthday, January 2nd. Shortly after that, he started to walk, like this:



He is all over the place now. He's even started to dance! Check this out (Over-proud parent warning: this could be a tedious 2 minutes to those not related or interested in babies dancing to OkGo dancing on treadmills; feel free to skip it)-




Other than that, January was a bit dreary. February, however started out with snow! I'll write more later.

Cheers!