Snowflake Lane and Luke's Christmas Program!

The two big things this week were going to Snowflake Lane in downtown Bellevue as a family and Luke's preschool Christmas program!

Luke and Marinda went to Snowflake Lane earlier in the week, and it was so great they wanted to bring the entire family! It's a Christmas parade in downtown Bellevue on a road that's between two of the malls (yes the malls are right next to each other. It is Bellevue, after all). They have people dressed in costumes like polar bears, penguins, drummer boys, ice princes and princesses, people on stilts, and all sorts of other fun stuff! To cap it all off they have fake bubble snow fall from the sky. It looks like real snow from a distance, but then you try to catch some in your hand and you realize it is most definitely not. Luke was really into it, and you could tell by the fact that he just stood there and stared at the entire thing without expression for 30 minutes. That's how you know he really likes something. Afterwards he said "can we come here every day?!?" Jacy...well Jacy got terrified anytime anyone in a costume came up to her, tried to give her a high five, waved to her, or even came into her peripheral vision.

Jacy checking out some pre-show lights

This was the best smile we got from her. "But she's not smiling!", you say. No, no she is not.

Eventually we bribed Jacy with candy to get a half-decent family photo. Memories!

Luke sang in his preschool class' Christmas program! He had been learning songs in his classroom for months to prepare and we had even heard him singing them at home. So he was definitely ready. On the day of, we get to his school and everyone is getting costumed up and apparently Luke didn't want to! Luckily we had him dressed in his nice Sunday outfit, so even though he wasn't a shepherd he still looked Christmas-y. Either that, or he was the best-dressed shepherd ever! He did a great job and you can see him singing and do the actions in the videos below. If you want to hear just Luke, the third video is of him singing at home!

Our happy little Mr. Rogers shepherd!

Luke ringing his bell with his classmates

Jacy crashing the after-party

Luke enjoying his post-game snacks!

The other cool thing we did as a family was go to the zoo. It was super-cold (like 20's cold), which meant that 1) no one was there and 2) a lot of the bigger animals were out and about trying to keep warm. The tigers were as active as we'd ever seen them. We saw the snow leopard walking around for the first time ever. We saw all the wolves walking around. And we saw a great video on bears in one of the buildings while taking a break to warm up! After seeing the animals we went to the Zoomazium (indoor playground) which was much more crowded than the rest of the zoo and let the kids run around like crazy.

Not quite as good as this one, but pretty good nonetheless

Snow Leopard!

Luke and the wolves

Jacy would see the otters and say "fishies!"

Jacy braving the slide at the Zoomazium

Luke and Jacy stories

•Luke and Jacy have been doing a lot better playing with each other (not that they were ever bad at it). Here's a video of Luke being the best big brother ever and reading Jacy a book one morning.

Luke and Jacy playing with each other in her room

•Luke and Jacy really like playing blocks together, though not always at the same time. Check out Jacy's face after Luke makes his silly face.

This is the cover photo for the Misra & Misra Architecture firm brochure

•We've been having Jacy sit on the bench at the kitchen table more since she's getting older. She's loving it so far, but one person who isn't so much is Luke. It's not that he minds having company, it's that Jacy keeps trying to snuggle up to him while they're supposed to be eating!

This is another instance of Jacy moving over...

And this is how Luke feels about this

Jacy stories:

•Jacy had her hair braided for the first time!

•Jacy in her car and ready to go!

Luke stories:

•Luke made this picture all by himself! He even drew the lines to color in!

In a previous post we showed a picture of what the view could look like from a hypothetical second story. This time we're going to share what the view looks like on the Ardmore trail, which Amit often uses to walk home from work if he's not being picked up. This is why we love living here! This is about a mile from our house and when the weather's nice Amit could walk this trail every day.

One last thing - Google Photos made a nice compilation of our smiles for the year 2016 (so far). It's actually not bad, and you can see a lot of the fun things we did this year!

Jacy vs Santa (spoiler alert: Jacy wins, Marinda loses)

This week we went to see Santa Claus! He was nice enough to take some time off of his busy schedule of being at malls to come to our church building! Luke was excited to tell Santa how he wants a crawler tractor. He got right on Santa's lap, gave a big smile, and made momma proud. It might have helped that we've been emphasizing how Santa is always watching to make sure he's on his best behavior :) Jacy, on the other hand, cried non-stop whenever we tried getting her near Santa without her security blanket (aka, Amit). We even tried giving her the candy cane beforehand, but even that didn't work! In the end, we had Amit hold her and stand somewhat near to Santa, and she wasn't too unhappy.

Look at the handsome boy!

This is best picture of Jacy and Santa that we got.

This is a more representative picture of how things went

After Santa we went to the most mature 5th birthday party ever! Luke's best friend Liam turned five, and instead of doing a normal 5th birthday party, Liam wanted two things: go rock climbing with his best friend Luke and have a couple people over for dinner: our family, his grandparents, and another close family friend. In total there would be 4 kids at the party: Luke, Liam, Darcy (Liam's sister who's Jacy's age), and Jacy. For dinner instead of wanting pizza or mac and cheese or something, he requested shrimp cocktails and mussels. No joke. 

Jacy Stories:

•Jacy gotten really into putting her "babies" to sleep. She'll pick up a stuffed animal or baby doll, wrap in it a burp cloth (the baby blanket), and bounce the baby to sleep while shushing it. Unfortunately, the first million times we tried to get a video Jacy would just laugh and run away. Thankfully, we managed to get a good video of her being adorable

•Jacy found a picture of Amit that we need to hang on the wall and she walked around saying "Daddy! Daddy!"

•Marinda was trying to rest one day but Jacy wasn't having any of that. She literally came over and say on Marinda's face!

•Jacy likes climbing into Luke's bunk bed. Check out this cute picture of her! And look at the other picture where we identified a ghost in our house.

•More cute pictures:

Luke does alphabet sticker pictures and each time he finishes one Marinda sings a phonics song and points to each letter with a lightsaber. And today after the song Jacy wanted to be like mommy!

Luke stories:

•Luke put up Christmas stuff on the door! He did a great job!

 •We let Luke play one of our grown-up games...sort of. We gave him Monumental moves  (like Cathedral) and told him to find a way to get all the pieces on the board. And he did it! Luke how proud he is of himself!

Luke and Jacy stories:

•We went to get Luke and Jacy's passports done, which meant we had to go to the courthouse. While we were waiting, Luke and Jacy had a blast playing in what must be the most unintentionally amazing government office waiting areas. They had the chairs set up in a giant circle, and the kids had a great time running around, and then they got inside and just ran and spun around.

•Last Sunday we watched the Christmas Devotional, and the kids sort of paid attention during the musical numbers and managed to entertain themselves. Jacy seemed mesmerized by the giant men talking on the screen. Other than that, they decided to get some bins and sit in them and repeatedly fall over!

Luke and Marshmallow fell down again!

•Luke and Jacy spontaneously started reading books in our room the other day. We're not sure what's up with the lighting in our bedroom, but this picture looks like it could be straight from the 70's between the colors and Jacy's crazy hair.

Ice Skating!

The big story this week is that Amit and Luke went ice skating! Luke's friend Liam and his dad were there too, and the boys all had a great time. Neither Luke nor Liam had ever been ice skating, and Amit had only been once nearly a decade ago, so there was a lot of falling and holding onto walls.

On the way there Luke thought we were going skiing, so he kept asking if we were going to the tundra (he thinks anything snowy is a tundra). And he also referred to this ice skates as skis at first, but eventually he figured it out. Getting on the ice at the beginning was challenging, but after a little bit he was able to hang on to the walls and not fall, and eventually he was able to go off the walls without falling (too much). Go Luke!

Luke and Liam skating with some help

One of the highlights was that we got to see the zamboni cleaning the ice! We were thinking about leaving around that time but there was no way Luke was going to miss this.

"How do you feel about seeing the zamboni Luke?" "Happy!"

Marinda also designed this year's Christmas card! You'll get getting one in the mail soon, but here's a sneak peak. Funny story - Marinda was trying to figure out what to write about our family and had all this stuff about her book and Amit's job, and Amit gently reminded Marinda that we had done something pretty significant a few months ago - we bought a house! It's crazy how our house already seems like home and so familiar. 

Luke stories:
•Luke likes making up songs, and he made one up about Christmas!

•Luke is starting to get opinionated about songs. In the car the other day 'Run Run Rudolph" was on and Amit changed it to a different station after a while. To which Luke responded "hey I liked Run Run Rudolph". After the song Luke asked when it would be on the radio again, and told us to switch to a different station to find it.

Jacy stories:
•Jacy thinks the Misra family dance is really funny. We were at Mod Pizza (which has really good background music) and we were dancing. Whenever Marinda did the Misra family dance Jacy would just start cracking up!

•Jacy is starting to get into putting her clothes on by herself. Good job Jacy!

•Jacy is also talking a lot more. This week she said "love blueberries" and "more Jesus", and is always babbling. We have no idea what she's saying, but it sounds like she'll have a lot to tell us when she can articulate better in a few months!

Luke and Jacy stories:

•Luke and Jacy both had coughs, so we gave them sore throat suckers. For this case, we used them as a bribe to get a cute picture.