We were able to see Mary and her family 3 times in January between stopping on our way home from the airport, coming up when Daniel was in town, and coming to meet baby Eli. We had many good conversations and I took lots of pictures of her kids.
Eli, or as Benjamin says, "lil cute" at less than 2 weeks old
How many Bears fit under a blanket? Answer: All of them, but nobody but Andrew will stay for longer than 20 seconds.
Andrew had to force his 'tent' on people after that. Elliot was his most compliant victim, but only barely.
Benjamin and Elliot were fascinated by flashlights
This kid is seriously adorable
Cousin buddies
Riding bikes to the park with Miss Rebekah
Andrew (shoeless as always) found some hipster glasses buried in the sand at the park
Pretty cute kids, huh?
Rebekah is very imaginative. She is SUPER good and drawing, and has achieved greater artistic abilities than I will ever manage at the age of 7. She enjoys talking for Elliot and Eli because they can't do it for themselves yet.
Andrew is a ball of energy, but very sweet. He's probably the best of the Bear kids at playing with Elliot, who he carries all over the house. I had to stop him from attempting to carry Elliot up the stairs several times. He and Benjamin walk around the house with swords stuck down the back of their shirts and break them out frequently to fight bad guys and uncles.
Benjamin is very quotable. He likes to appoint people to be his 'partner' and will work that title into every sentence he says to you in his gruff bad-guy-fighting voice. He's a super cute little guy.
Eli is a two week old baby, so he doesn't get a blurb yet :)
Elliot is pretty good at sleeping through the 1 hr 45 min drive if we time it right.
I turned 25! It really snuck up on me this year. They called me up to sing happy birthday to me in Primary the Sunday before my birthday and I was completely blindsided- I thought it was a week later.
Aaron did a great job of spoiling me. We went out to dinner at a fancy burger place I picked out.
Elliot was amused by the dangling string on my hoodie
What a great little buddy
Aaron also sneakily made me a fancy chocolate raspberry cake the night before my birthday while I was at a Relief Society activity. He asked me to get him something from the fridge when I got home and BAM-O there was a cake in there!
We did a video call with my family on my birthday so that they could sing to me and watch us eat cake. Elliot liked this cake much more than the carrot cake cupcakes we made for his birthday and downed quite a bit of it. Delish!
Well done, sneaky baker Aaron
Aaron got me a baking stone, so I can now attempt to make fancy breads (Stealing a cookbook from the Hays helped too)
How does it feel to be 25? Pretty good. I'm quite pleased with the experiences I've had in my first quarter century and am looking forward to the next!
We went on a number of adventures after Christmas. The first was a venture to the American History Museum, complete with our best buddy KRISTY TUNG!
Krust and Aaron as nutcrackers. I made them do this.
Elliot was delighted with the displays that had buttons to push, although he mostly tried to pick them up.
Aaron and I escaped for a few hours to go to the temple on our anniversary. We're pretty much pros after 4 years of this marriage thing.
DC Temple
We headed back to DC for a trip to the Natural History Museum, which is the classic favorite. Unfortunately we were only able to stay for about an hour, but it was still good.
Elliot unimpressed with the Rhino
Even less with the Giraffe
The bear was cool though
New Year's day turned out to be the most arcade-filled day of my adult life. Breezy and Blake were invited to a party at Dave & Busters and we tagged along. I lost my jacket somewhere, but Elliot got to push lots and lots of flashing buttons.
Oh the glory
Later that night was the crown jewel of our break- a laser tag trip! They have unlimited laser tag after 9:00 at this nearby place that has a two story laser tag arena, so we left Mom at home with the sleeping baby and had a grand old time battling a bunch of 10-year-olds and very hard core guys in their 20's. We convinced Dad to come with us and we got pretty into it. The only downside is that the place was really busy that night so we had to wait a pretty long time between games.
Blake getting artsy with the claw game between laser tag matches
We were hoping to spend a day with Jonny and Megan, but a bout of the stomach flu wiped them out pretty well. We settled on meeting a few of the healthy ones at a Chick-Fil-A for lunch. We were especially excited to see Seth after receiving so many entertaining text messages from him while "borrowing" his mom's phone.
We had another week in McLean after Christmas. A lot of hanging out, watching Elliot empty out drawers, and chocolate in every form happened.
Elliot loved all the new stuff to play with, places to explore, and most of all the non-stop attention
A prime example of the non-stop attention
Blake kept making this my phone wallpaper. Punk.
He also tried hard to convince Elliot that his weird hair is cool.
What a great picture of Bearded Clint
We got to go visit Grammie and Papa. I hadn't seen Grammie in a couple years and it was their first time meeting their one and only great-grandchild.
Elliot loves the talking puppy they got him for Christmas
Elliot doing some serious relaxation
On New Year's Eve we watched a movie marathon and ate Chinese food. The line up this year was Dr. Strangelove (I missed most of that putting Elliot to sleep, but everyone else seemed to like it), Antman, and the new Mission Impossible.
The first night we were in McLean, Santa came by on a firetruck!
I'm not sure why Santa is in the firetruck either, bud. And yes, there is a platypus beanie baby in Elliot's hood.
Ho Ho Ho!
Elliot and Grumpa are still best buds
We were really lucky to have our old neighbor Mariko stay with us in between her adventures to NYC and Cancun. Her dad works for the Japanese foreign service, and she lived across the street from us in Elementary school. She is doing a year abroad in Boston and took some time during the winter break to hang out with us. She fits in super well with the family and is a cut throat Bohnanza player.
Mariko and Breezy
Christmas eve was sadly undocumented in pictures, but there were lots of random video clips incorporated into the video that Breezy made that I'll put at the end of the post. Mom and Aunt Trisha spent several hours scrambling around to various grocery stores and CVS's trying to get last minute dinner ingredients and the picture book for Grammie and Papa that I accidentally ordered for pickup at the wrong store. Sorry about that one.
We finally settled down to Christmas Eve Fondue, which is my favorite holiday tradition and Aaron's least favorite. I gave Elliot some marshmallow, which he got all over his hands. He thought it was hilarious to put his sticky marshmallow hands on his ears and pull them off again over and over. His cuteness was appropriately praised by all present.
Near the end of dinner, Mariko mentioned something about shrimp and everyone flipped out thinking that there was secret shrimp to be eaten somewhere. We spent the rest of the break joking about Mariko's shrimp stash.
Mom was eager to let us help wrap all the presents, but we had to persuade her that it was ok for us to carry all the presents upstairs and put them under the tree. I assured her that we would be able to maintain appropriate levels of Christmas Magic.
Christmas morning
Christmas morning used to be a race to see who could wake up the earliest. This year, we won hands down thanks to Elliot. The night owls (everyone but us and Dad) eventually trickled downstairs. We all gathered in the living room and put Elliot on the floor. He immediately darted to the extremely interesting present pile. He had a great time pulling tissue paper out of all the bags, but didn't quite grasp the concept of opening wrapping paper.
Climbing Mt. Presentpile
Uncle Clint was enthusiastic about instilling a love of amphibians and insects in Elliot
Most of the Christmas Crew. Mariko, Clint, and I were on the other couch and Elliot was off wreaking havoc somewhere.
The traditional pull-aparts for Christmas breakfast.
That afternoon we got to skype Max in Salt Lake. It felt like a board room meeting- we were all sitting on a table with him on the laptop at the end. He has become such a great missionary and is loving it. Max mailed us all Christmas cards with classic absurd illustrations and references to weird Old Testament scriptures. Dad got the one about the kids that get mauled by a bear after they make fun of Elijah for being bald- so appropriate!
The rest of the day was dedicated to prepping the Christmas Feast. We had an exceedingly fancy beef wellington as the main dish with lots of delectable sides and deserts provided by Bret & Shannon (my cousin who now lives in Chantilly).
We got to spend 2 weeks with my family in McLean for the Christmas and New Years. First stop was a night at Mary's house for family bonding and a conveniently-close-to-the-Phoenix-Airport place to crash before our ridiculously early flight.
Cute little monkey brothers. Benjamin loves telling people about how him and Andrew are brothers and they have a little brother on the way.
Andrew was obsessed with carrying Elliot places. Elliot was surprisingly accepting of this mode of transportation.
We had to wake up at 3:30 AM to catch our flight. Luckily Elliot took a decent nap on the plane. Aaron got a good long snooze and I dozed off for a bit too.
Sleeping baby on a plane
Elliot was a great little traveler, which was extra impressive because he was short on sleep.
He was probably so well behaved because he was wearing his planes shirt on the plane
Little blue eyed baby
Not much crawling space down there
And last but not least: Our not traditional "family on a plane" selfies
Elliot turned 1 on December 20! It was the Sunday before Christmas, so we went to church in the afternoon.
Birthday boy with a seasonal backdrop
He had some great pre-church entertainment from the Prestwich boys. Love all the blondies.
After Church and a nap, we had some friends over for cupcakes. I forgot to put eggs in the first batch (which is really impressive because it was a box mix so I literally only had to add 3 things), so most of the cupcakes were exceedingly crumbly. I also was a little experimental about the frosting, so it was a "choose your own adventure" type of treat.
Elliot was... not thrilled about the whole birthday party thing.
"HOW DARE YOU SING TO ME AND GIVE ME A CUPCAKE"
Note the frosting on his hand. He grabbed the cupcake before we got the candle in it. He was restrained so that he wouldn't grab the lit candle.
Momentarily distracted by fire
Back to crying
"*sob* I guess I'll eat some of my cupcake *sob*"
He was much happier once the cupcake ordeal was over and we let him crawl around. I think he was tired and scared of Lakin's big, soul-snatching camera, because he cried whenever she took a picture of him.
Here's the video for all you dedicated Elliot fans out there:
