My boy loves BANANAS!

The only bummer about this hilarious video is that the camera stopped the recording (the memory card was full) only seconds before he pointed at the kitchen and said, "Mas bananas."
Because one is never enough. :)

House for Sale

Well, we officially have our house on the market.

I spent the entire week after Match Day prepping the house for our realtor to take pictures. Monday: we interviewed realtors, ordered mulch, and did prep work outside. Tuesday: Dan, the wonderful Ann Hiatt, and I spent many hours (the whole day) putting 10 cubic yards of mulch all around the house. I really wish I had taken pictures of that pile in the driveway or before pictures of the exterior of our house. During the rest of the week: I power-washed the siding, we cleaned up a bunch of clutter, Elena and I planted flowers and junipers, we removed a couple pieces of furniture, and packed some boxes.
This past week, we continued with the cleaning, touched up paint around the house, I changed our brass door knobs into brushed nickel, made many trips to Lowes and Home Depot, planted new grass seed, and we organized closets and the garage (very time consuming!). That's just a summary. I don't want to bore you with too many details. :)

(Did you notice the sleeping kids in the pics above?)

The result is that we have a beautiful uncluttered house with no toys in the front room (except blocks). The kids have been really good about watching us pack up 1/2 of their toys. It's so clean that it makes me want to go stay in a hotel until the house sells so that we don't mess anything up. I guess I'll just have to extra vigilant with cleaning up every night in order to keep the stress down. We had our first showing today. I'm so grateful to have had someone come and look at our house already. They ate some of the cookies that Dan made, but I don't think they took a house brochure that our realtor left on the sofa table. I'm keeping my fingers crossed anyway.

I wanted to put this post out there right now to say thank you to my awesome friends who helped out by watching the kids (Emily, Melissa, and Marianne among others), mulching (Ann), picking up stuff for the Young Women's garage sale (Hna Rivera), letting me change around the preschool schedule (Andrea, Aimee, Marianne, and Melissa), letting me borrow tools/equipment (Sis Schell, Ann, Dad), and my parents who always help out with stuff around the house when they are visiting. Thanks for staying up late with us last night to help with the cleaning, Mama! We are so blessed to have such amazing friends! We love you!

And the letter said...

Dan will be doing his residency at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk!
Now we just have to sell our house, choose a city to live in (Virginia Beach/Norfolk/Chesapeake), buy or rent a house there, and go! We are definitely bummed to leave this area, our friends here, our house, our neighborhood, the Spanish branch where we attend church, etc, but it will be fun to experience new things and meet new people (and live within 30 minutes of my parents). Dan is very excited about the hospital there (CHKD) and the program. EVMS was in his top 3, so we feel very blessed today.

Here is some documentation of the day's events:

Looking at the letters sitting on a table until noon was torture!

Emily was sweet to offer to take a family picture of us - all in green for St Patrick's Day.

Dan let Elena open the letter, and I was dying of impatience!

After dropping the kids off with Melissa (THANKS!), we went to a fancy luncheon and each student got to announce where they were going and put a pin on a map of the US.

Blueberries

Recently we had waffles for breakfast with blueberries on top (a favorite of both kids). Kevin got a little bit of blue on his lips, and I mentioned that it was cute. I left the room for a minute and when I came back this is what I found. Kevin loves to do everything his big sister does. She, of course, wanted to be "cute" too.
As a side note, Kevin started to call Elena "Nay-nuh" instead of "Da" last week. Despite the fact that he says hundreds of words, he never once called her anything but "Da" until Wednesday. :)

Big news for Dan: Today we found out that he officially matched! We'll know where on Thursday at noon.

Sporty Little Girl

We are so lucky! The university field hockey team here does a free 8 week field hockey program in February and March for 4-11 year olds. Elena started 3 weeks ago. It's adorable, and she has so much fun. She loves to say, "Field hockey is my first sport." She's on a little team of other 4 year olds. Each week they stretch, do drills, and scrimmage. The first two pictures are from week 1 and the rest are from yesterday.

Warming up:

Taking a shot:

Showing good ball control. :)

Her #1 fan:

Bookin' it:

Per Shelby's request, here's the a picture of my high school team that I scanned in from the yearbook (sorry, Shelby, I didn't go into the attic to get a real pic). I'm second from the left in the back row - kind of bent over. This was such a great team! We were a close group!

My very last Christmas post, I promise!

CHRISTMAS EVE:

Aunt BB and E spending some quality time together while rolling out the dough for the annual Wright Family Christmas Cookies.
She kept right on working on her cookies after the rest of us were done.
These are my kind of cookies: Heavy on the sprinkles and frosting! Well done, Elena.

CHRISTMAS DAY:

We had a fantastic Christmas. We all felt very blessed/spoiled. It was so fantastic in fact, that my parents announced that we will each only get 4 gifts next year: Something you want, something you need, something to play with, something to read. Sounds good to me. :)
This train set was a big hit.

I love the resurgence of 80's toys like Strawberry Shortcake:
A favorite gift of Dan's:

BOXING DAY (if we were in Canada):

This snow storm was amazing and breathtakingly gorgeous. It started on Christmas in the evening and kept right on snowing for about 24 hours. 12 inches worth. One thing I love about living in this region? It was almost 70 degrees less than a week later.

He could not walk at all.

On the 27th, Grandad used his boundless energy to pull the grandkids around the yard on a boogie board.

The second to the last...

We each got a Wii for Christmas because my awesome older brother was a programmer on Epic Mickey (which is super fun btw). We all enjoyed playing Epic Mickey as well the Wii Sports Resort and a couple of other games.
Even my dad did some bowling! I couldn't believe it. :)
For some reason, nothing is more fun to these kids than pulling out all the cereal and playing peek-a-boo in the cupboard. Elena introduced Kevin to the fun, and then he taught Ari in the video below.
As you can see in the video above, Kevin was a little pushy with his littler cousin. Well, it only took a few days before she figured out that she needed to fight back. He modeled the correct usage of the word "mine!" for her over and over, and soon she was a pro at that too. He stopped being so bossy after a couple of days, and it was so cute to see them play together.
It was so good to see Erin and Bami while we were both in town. I'm so, so, so grateful that our parents still live across the street from each other! I love that whole family. Poor Erin was sick at the time, but she was still a good sport to take a picture with us. :)
Look at my sweet niece's little pigtails! So cute!
This was the family (plus a couple of missionaries in the back and minus an under-the-weather Ari and her parents) caroling at Nana DiSistos.
Our view of some of the DiSistos from the front porch. There's more of them in the front room. Is it any wonder that it's our favorite stop each Christmas Eve?
This wasn't in Virginia or in December, but I love this pic of Kevin sleeping at the science museum. He's such a good boy. 5 minutes prior, he was running around and laughing.

Aquarium in December

I've decided to break up our Christmas pictures into smaller, easier to view chunks. We had a great time at the Virginia Aquarium with the whole family (minus Mom). We look forward to going back soon since my parents bought a membership. Yay!