Toy Box Explosion

A minor toy box explosion marks Christmas 2008 with Charlotte. Merry Christmas!

Christmas Lights, 2008 Style

Heidi, Charlotte and I spent most of the day setting up our Christmas light display. It's not much different from last year, but we have big ideas for next year. This was the first time Charlotte has "helped" us with this project, and she is in love with all things Christmas. When it got dark tonight Charlotte and I went for a walk around the neighborhood to "ooh" and "ahh" over the other lights around the block. She gets extra excited about snowmen right now for some reason. Whenever we're driving around town and we see Christmas lights, she demands to be taken to see more.
PHOTO GEEKERY AHEAD: I had fun making this photo... I was playing around with time exposures but the Santa kept coming out overexposed compared to the rest of the lights. For this shot I used a 20 second exposure at f/22, but I started the shot with Santa unplugged. After I hit the shutter, I counted off 10 seconds then plugged him in so he was only in the shot for half the time. I probably should have tried eight or even five seconds on Santa, but I was getting tired so I decided this was good enough.

Christmas 2007 Wrap Up

What was quite possibly the longest Christmas day I can remember is starting to come to a close, so here's some pictures of the girl with her favorite new toys! Why longest? Mostly because she decided she was ready to get up at 4:45. We thought we'd have at least one more year before the daughter woke up in the wee hours crazy with anticipation of what Santa had brought, but today she is teething and was just kind of grumpy. So we stumbled down the stairs, and began our Christmas about three hours before the sun joined us.

Charlotte loved the doll given to her from Grandma Robbins (left). She also got a cool ride on airplane (above), a book about the ABC's with pictures of her in it, and an awesome IKEA play tunnel she can crawl through (below).

As for mom and dad, I've been jamming on the new fake guitar I got as part of the game "Rock Band" all day, and Heidi's been trying to figure out her new GPS unit that should help her navigate around the worst of the traffic around Seattle. The best part of the day, though, has been hanging out as a family, with no where to be and no worries in the world. It's been a terrific Christmas.

Christmas at the Brown's

So, there was 3 1/2 inches of rainfall today, so we thought the smartest thing to do was to decorate the outside of the house. Actually, we didn't get outside until the afternoon, when a lot of the rain let up, so it wasn't that bad. But doesn't our house look great!

Merry Christmas,
The Grisbrown's