Christmas

 Our Christmas started on Christmas Eve when we went over to a friend's house for Christmas Eve dinner. We had a delicious meal of crown rib roast.

Carter playing with his new helicopter

Inside is a knife sharpener from my dad to my mom, so on the tag my dad wrote: "Looking forward to sharpening our relationship together in 2012"

iCarter opening his gift from iMom.

(The gift was an iTunes gift card so mom had fun with the tag)

On Tuesday we drove up to Virginia to my aunt's house, to see her family, my grandparents, and my mom's brother and other sister. We didn't know one of the sisters was coming till the night before so it ended up being a surprise family reunion!

They have two cats, Dixie (pictured) and Rebel, who are always eager to play.

Mr. Gray here is the newest member of the extended family and consequently received the most attention

which he seemed to enjoy

David and Gray. One of my favorite pictures of the trip

We took a lot of pictures but I won't bore you friends with that, so here is the group photo

                           Up

We watched 

(Emily thinks my cute design with "up" looks really dumb but I think its cute)

The next day we headed into D.C on the metro. 

The Capital

Inside the Library of Congress. 

We were not allowed to take pictures inside the exhibits, consequently I don't have many pictures. Thankfully, the lobby was the most beautiful part of all and I was allowed to take pictures of that.

A brilliant blue sky and a bright red scarf look splendid together

Summary of the Bill of Rights

We went to the National Gallery of Art next; I didn't find it very interesting to take pictures of paintings so here is just one, by Claude Monet.

We decided it was a lot more interesting to see this situation (leopard hanging is prey from a tree) in real life, in Africa

Can you imagine if these things were still alive!?

Walking along the National Mall.

(Emily is mentioning she has really cute boots)

The Washington Monument at twilight

The three girls in front of the National Christmas tree. Kind of a letdown if you ask me.  What's with that odd shape anyway?

Hanging out in the morning

On our second day in the city we had lunch at Meatballs, I had delicious chicken meatballs, on pasta with fettucini sauce

Emily and I went into the National Archives. Again I couldn't take any pictures. But we did see the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence was surprisingly faded, almost all the signatures were completely faded, you could only make out the "J" and "H" of John Hancock's signature 

I thought this picture was funny with the people next to us.

And life on a D.C. street to close out this post