Bonfante Gardens

It was a chilly night and a long drive, but well worth it! Bonfante Gardens, located in Gilroy, is an amusement park dedicated to toddlers and young children. This time of year they are decked out for Christmas. The kids enjoyed the rides (as did the adults -- thanks to Criag's urging, Dad and I nearly lost our lunches on the banana split.) The babies enjoyed the lights and the spectacle. Here are Andrew and Hannah sharing a ride in the double stroller:


Andrea and me in our winter warm fuzzies:

Julia on the Goldfish ride:

And Nathan sharing some guy cousin time with Andrew in the stroller:

Another cute one from the pajama party!

Leisurely morning

Snuggling in the big bed in our PJs one Saturday morning

Holiday decorating

Our newly converted-to-gas fireplace is done just in time for the holidays! Here is a picture of Andrew enjoying the new cozy fireplace.

It's hard to see it here, but we did more than ever to decorate the outside of our house. In addition to the lights on the roofline, we also wound little white lights around the two trees flanking our driveway. This picture hardly does it justice... it looks spectacular in person! Jeff did a great job.

I haven't got a good picture of the decorated Christmas tree yet, but you can see the bottom third of it in this picture of Andrew.

 

Look at our great helper!

Julia was a huge help in our holiday preparations this weekend. She particularly loved the sweeping, which is one of her favorite activities. In the bottom picture she is helping Daddy install the new gas logs in our fire place.

 

Christmas tree selection day

When I was a kid we'd head up the mountain to hunt for the perfect tree, chop it down, strap it to the roof of the car, and then enjoy a cup of homemade hot chocolate from mom's thermos. Our christmas tree outing this weekend had echoes of this tradition, but with a decidedly modern twist... We picked up our tree at the corner lot. We put it in the trunk of our minivan. We headed to Starbucks for hot chocolate. It may lack some of the romance, but it got the job done.

Here's the tree in the back of the expedition:


The tree looks tiny in the picture above, but actually it was so big it almost didn't fit into our stand:

Here is Julia enjoying her hot chocolate at Starbucks:

And here is Jeff doing surgery on the tree to get it to fit into the stand: