The Golden Weekend

In medical residency speak there is such a thing as the "black weekend" which is the weekend out of the month that you don't get a day off. On the flip side of that hopefully you also end up with a "golden weekend" which is the only weekend out of that month that you get the entire weekend off. This past week was Gabriel's golden weekend in a hard month in the ICU and it really lived up to it's name. We had a wonderful time not doing anything terribly exciting but had lot's of fun just being together.

One somewhat exciting thing though was Oliver's first big art experience. He has had a couple of small drawing experiences so far but I don't think he was terrible aware of the cause and effect of what he was experiencing but bellow are photos of a really wonderful full body art experience. It occurred with out any planning or prodding, but instead was a discovery all his own while crawling around Gabriel's wood working project of building a bookcase for Oliver's room.

Breakfast at the Green Bean

In the backyard of our wonderful neighbors Bill, Valerie and Shira. Yes, that s a ukulele and Bill takes it very seriously and plays it beautifully

Making aunt Emily's famous banana bread

Tucked in after a great weekend!

Doing Just Fine

A few days ago we crossed the one month mark of living in our new home. The home we own, in a new state, figuring out as we go how we want to combine our old lives and our new ones. We miss our friends, and we miss our family, but slowly we build new friendships and are very thankful for how cool of a little town we ended up in. We also love our little street filled with wonderful neighbors and lots of kids.

I will do a different post with a tour of our house but this photo was taken in garden on the side of our house with our recently built and planted vegetable garden. We are also feeling pretty lucky to have a back yard and front yard and some wonderful landscaping that is flowering like crazy from the previous owners.

You can pretty much picture Oliver standing in this exact position every day around 5pm EST as he watches me water the veggies and tries to decide whether to pull the name markers on the tomato plants or eat dirt.

Homemade gifts

I had a lot of fun this Christmas adding and growing with the homemade gifts that were given by us. You already saw the wonderful Turn A Square hats that were made and other knits. Here are some of the other fun things. Dried apple chips and bananas, hot and sweet mustard, blackberry jam from the summer and yummy chai tea. I was pleased with the way the packaging worked out with the tea. I had found these great tins 1/2 off and then painted them white for labels. I had Gabriel do the writing because I don't like my handwritting and he insisted on doing them all with different labels which actually worked out to be really fun. Oh, and I do love packaging in brown lunch bags!