lots of fun this week

With the Thanksgiving break, we had a bit of extra time to do some things. This was a blessed break from the norm of feeling panicked and that there were too many things we couldn't get to, so it was extra-nice.
Thanksgiving week started pretty exciting for Seattle, in that we had snow and cold (see previous post). Thanksgiving itself was pretty OK. Sky had to work a call shift and spent that 24 hours working, so that meant Taj and Peregrine were on their own for the day. Thankfully (heh heh), Uncle Loren was hosting a Thanksgiving Extravaganza at his place so we headed down there to enjoy some turkey and various pot-lucked goodies.
The following day we both had off, and we had Erica, our "Mom's Helper/Nanny" come by for most of the day. Sky got to get some sleep. I was feeling bad having just gotten through two consecutive major holidays without any sort of fanfare at home, so I busted out the Christmas decorations and got to work putting lights up on the house. Would you believe we were the first house in the neighborhood to have lights up, the very day after Thanksgiving? Yeah, I thought so.
Then, since we wanted an opportunity to enjoy it, we went ahead and got our christmas tree up! I'll be in DC next week and two weeks from now we go to MN, so we felt we should seize the moment and just get one. It's a very nice noble fir. A little on the small side from the norm, but we're trying to scale back a bit - we always end up with one way too large! Peregrine helped decorate it and just loves to look at it with its lights on.
Then on Sunday we took advantage of the recent snowfall in the mountains and headed out for our first cross country ski. Unlike our last ski (in New Mexico), this one didn't start 9,000 feet up so it felt easy as pie. It didn't hurt that the snow conditions were just about perfect - enough stick to get good kick but cold and compact enough for very nice glide. We skied for about 1.5 hours on a railroad grade and it was really very nice. Peregrine slept most of the time in one of his carriers (we tried both the Ergo and the Bjorn to see which was better). Passing a few folks out with their babies in trailers, we have briefly entertained the idea of picking something like that up. Sounds like they're pricey, though. If anyone knows of a good low-priced version we're all ears.
Anyway, a very nice ski wrapped up a very nice holiday weekend. We were thrilled to both get some stuff done around the house AND have a chance to do something fun and outdoors. If only there were four-day weekends every week!

Pictures!

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