HMNS Snow Daze

Early this month we took Julia over to the museum of natural science for their Snow Daze, where they have snow brought in on the lawn and you can bring you your children out for them to play on it. It will likely be the only snow Julia sees this season, so we took her.

After playing on the snow, we let her play with the fountain. She had a good time.

Fall Colors

The fall after we moved into our house, we planted some trees to start to get some more shade on our side yard and the side of the house. They are October Glory Maples, and turn brilliant colors even though it doesn't get too cold here. They add a little color to the house in the fall.

More of Julia

Some pictures from a few weeks ago . . .

Tici and Julia

Tici is Julia's nanny. She comes every day and takes great care of Julia, teaching her Portuguese. Julia loves to see her come in every day and tries to follow her when Tici leaves at the end to go to school. She's been a great blessing to us, knowing that Julia is with someone who cares about her.

Here are a few pictures of the two of them together.

Christmas Decorating

Since we came home from camping early, we had time to set up the Christmas decorations. Julia was pretty fascinated with all of the ornaments.

Thanksgiving Camping

For thanksgiving, we got out of town to go camping and relax some. There's a nice, quiet campground about 2 and a half hours out of town in the Piney Woods of East Texas. We intended to stay a couple of days, so we setup a pretty nice campground, with a covered picnic table (with light for Neil's gourmet camp cooking) and a screen tent to hide from the bugs when they come out in the evening. These supplemented the screen shelter (no tent camping anymore) where we set up the cots for sleeping.

We even had a little camping chair for Julia. The weather was nice and warm when on the first day. Shorts and t-shirts weather.

The night of the first day, the cold front blew in, and the shorts and t-shirt weather was gone. After that we had to bundle up.

We left a day early, but we enjoyed our time out of the city, enjoying a little bit of God's Creation.

Nice Trike

When Raquel first worked at Exxon, she was at an old gas plant west of Houston. When they shut the plant down, the got rid of a lot of stuff at the plant, giving it away to employees. Raquel took the opportunity to pick up a workman tricycle. Its been sitting in the garage until just a few weeks ago, when we took it down to the Scrap Daddy, who creates art cars about 3 blocks from the house.

In about two hours, the Scrap Daddy took it from this . . .

To this . . .