Thursday, December 22, 2011

Holiday Time!

It's crazy that it's almost Christmas again. I thought I would catch up with a few pictures that we've taken during this holiday season. We had our friend Sam over and had a nice Thanksgiving at home

I made a caramel apple pie for dessert and I was pretty proud of how it turned out. It was delicious!
It's been really fun having a house to decorate for Christmas this year. The day after Thanksgiving we went out to pick out our tree. They always look so much smaller when they are in the lot...we cut a bit off of it and it ended up looking great!
One of my favorite ornaments from this year...excuse the nudity
Here are a few more pictures of the house decorated for Christmas...
found this cute card holder
We did peppermint cupcakes for our neighbor gifts this year. Last weekend we went to Longwood gardens to see their Christmas display. The theme this year was "gingerbread fantasy." They had a couple of pretty awesome gingerbread replications of the buildings at longwood
all of the windows were made out of sugar, I wanted to poke one really badly! Here are a few more pictures of longwood
Have a wonderful Christmas!


Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Colonial Williamsburg

Last weekend we took a little mini vacation to Williamsburg, Virginia with my parents. The weather was gorgeous and we had a great time. The first day we visited colonial Williamsburg. In the early 1900's, the historic district of Williamsburg was restored by the Vanderbilt family to look like it did during the revolutionary war. A lot of the buildings are original. It is pretty amazing (we are big history nerds). We went to the reenactment of a trial in the old courthouse, went to the actual jail where blackbeard's pirates were held, and toured the governor's mansion


They also had a bunch of cool reenactments, like when the town was captured in the war by Benedict Arnold. The next day went to the battlefield at Yorktown, where the last battle of the revolutionary war was fought. We went on a pretty great ranger tour of the battlefield (I do love those rangers!). We also went to the original settlement at Jamestown. My family is pretty big into genealogy and family history and while we were there we saw a picture of one of the ancestors on my dad's side, one of my great great (lots of greats) grandfathers, Thomas West the 3rd "Baron de la Warr."
(can't you see the family resemblance?)I didn't know anything about him and I guess he was the first Governor of Virginia and was a big reason that the Jamestown colony didn't fail. Thanks mom and dad for a really fun weekend!