To Morgantown we went!

So last Saturday we said goodbye to Northern Virginia, and headed for the West Virginia hills.  We loved so much living in Herndon, and will dearly miss our many friends there.  Fortunately, with Mark done with school and me taking a break from work, we were able to have some good visits with our friends before leaving.    We also enjoyed a wonderful visit from Mark's parents and sister at his graduation.  We had a truly fabulous time with them, and ran around doing all kinds of fun things all week (including but not limited to:  Mt. Vernon,  Dulles Air and Space museum, Smithsonian, and lots of going out for dinner).  Mark's mom treated me to a mani/pedi, a luxury I have enjoyed only one other time in my life.  We wish we didn't live so far away from them, but as Mark's mom said before they headed home, "we'll try not to be sad the visit is over, we'll just be grateful that it happened!"  We love them so much!   

         Now we are well settled here in Morgantown, and are feeling so far so good.  We like our apartment, and I included a couple pictures here so those interested can take a brief virtual tour :)  We've been to lots of parks and playgrounds, driven all over town, got a library card, and even started forming some running routes.  And running here is no small feat.....after 20 minutes on the Morgantown hills I'm completely beat.  I got some pictures at a state forest park that we went to on Thursday called Cooper's Rock, which is about 30 minutes from our doorstep, and roughly 10 miles east of Morgantown.  We will definitely be returning there...it was beautiful, the kids had a great time, and there are lots of places to hike, camp and picnic.   We went to church on Sunday, and everyone was friendly and excited about the massive influx of new families coming this month as people arrive for medical residency.  It's fun to be in a place where there are so many families in our exact situation.  We are excited about this new adventure!

The girls built a "fire" on the trail....their technique was not too bad actually, they started with small sticks in a pile and built up to bigger ones.

Vienna was proud of her fire.

As was Juliette....it was her idea to make one to begin with.

Of course the real highlight was the playground at the visitor's center.

The view from Cooper's Rock...gorgeous.

Another angle of the view from Cooper's Rock.

The girls decided to do some "rock climbing"

Setting up the girls' room

Pretty self explanatory

I am excited to have both a living room and family room in this apartment...so here is our "formal"living room

And the family room where we actually do most of our playing and hanging out.

Vienna's Second Year

As promised, here is the second video for our little bean, celebrating her 2nd year of life:

Vienna's First Year

Here's a tribute to our bright-eyed little girl.  We did these videos for Jules and thought it would be best to continue the practice for Vienna (you know, to prevent future sibling conflict, and also because she's adorable), but life got busy, so this one's about a year late.  Her second year video should be coming shortly :)

birthday girls

My girls both recently had birthdays.  Along with showing off their cuteness, my motivation for posting these pictures is to show off the cakes I decorated.  I'm kind of proud of them, as I did them both free hand.  I've never been much of an artist, but apparently my medium is food.  I guess I just needed something motivating enough to pull the gift out of me, and it is not surprising that food did that for me.  The my little pony cake was much much more difficult than the Caillou cake, so naturally it is not as good.  But at least you can tell what it is.  Also....happy birthday to my beautiful girls!  We're so glad to have them, they bring so much laughter, joy and happy complication into our lives. Here's to many more years with them!  

What? It's too late to post about Christmas?

So we kind of missed posting about Christmas, and all the other major happenings since early November. We won't try to fill you in, but here are some pictures from Christmas, because we think our kids were cute on Christmas. It was the first year that Jules was really excited about Christmas, and that was fun. Also, my entire family was together at my parents house, and we had a marvelous time together. It was the last Christmas we will spend at the house my sister and brother and I grew up in, since my parents will be moving this summer. I also threw in some pictures from this past month just for fun.

The decorations that Jules and Vienna made after Thanksgiving

How our tree looked after the girls got to it and took everything off. (They made an attempt to take off the lights too, but they couldn't manage to get them all the way off the tree so they were satisfied at keeping them dangling there)

Because Vienna looks cute in big hats

The gingerbread (a.k.a cardboard) house we made

The girls got a strawberry shortcake table for Christmas, and a tiny tea set. Here is their first tea party at the table. (Which happened moments after receiving the table).

Playing chef. Jules made the hat at preschool and they got inspired to cook together. And yes, Juliette is wearing that apron like a halter top, instead of a shirt.

Vienna loves babies. We watched my friend's baby for a couple hours and she spent most of the time hovering over her like this.

Farewell October...you were good to us

Here are pics of our October festivities!

painting pumpkins

at the pumpkin patch! We went with my parents and had a blast

the little hayride we took

She made it to the middle!

We offered to get Juliette's face painted, but she opted to have her hand painted instead. This is her "rainbow pony" (a.k.a unicorn as we adults like to say)

Vienna went down this slide over and over for like 20 minutes. She was loving it

and last of all....our tiny trick-or-treaters. Their first year going. Juliette is wearing a snow white dress and cape that my mom made for me 23 years ago which I wore for a couple halloweens. I'll find the picture of 5 year old Brittany wearing it and post it with this one soon. And of course, Vienna is the cutest kitty cat that ever graced the planet. She did a lot of "meowing" that evening.

Half Marathon!

Yesterday Mark and I ran our first half marathon. It started at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown VA, and looped through historic Antietam (which was beautiful) through Sharpsburg and then back to the university. It was an awesome experience for both of us. Weather was perfect, 50 degrees and drizzling. The scenery was amazing, it was neat to look at the mountains in the distance and the rolling green hills around us. Mark made it into the top 100, finishing 89th out of 786 runners, with a time of 1:45:39. I finished with a time of 2:07:23 (3 minutes faster than my goal time!) We both finished well into the top half of total runners, which was exciting. Being in an actual race was a cool experience because there are so many other people doing it with you, and the spirit of comradery (and casual competition), really added a fun element. All in all, we both had great runs and it was fun and exhilarating. We're planning on more racing in the future!

Mark finished well before me, so he could snap a pic of me coming to the finish