Our Christmas and New Year's

 Christmas and New Year's have come and gone and we've had so much fun, no time to write or post in here. We've been so blessed to be with my parents and celebrate this past year's comings and goings, blessings and trials together.  I'll let the pictures tell the story, but a quick word of caution: this is a loooong post!

Home-made sugar cookies under mamaie's loving supervision:

Dressed-up as a shepherd (she used her Romanian traditional outfit for that...!) in the ward Christmas get-together:

Night on the town:

Santa came and made a little one and us, the big ones VERY HAPPY!!! ;)

Her first real doll-house

But before Santa came, we had a little Christmas Eve concert at our house with piano performances by

Ella and English and Romanian Christmas carols by all.

After the concert, Ella gave us our gifts that she carefully wrapped for everyone. They were her favorite toys :)

And then some more piano and caroling on Christmas day after Church:

Ate some really good food (anchovies paste filled tomatoes, caviar (well, the imitation) :), smoked salmon, Romanian potato salad (salata de boef), and a delish pork crown roast with stuffing and home-made cranberry sauce.)

We topped it off with some yummy cake from "Nothing Bundt Cakes" and a home-made snowman cake by mom and "store" wrapped by me, for Ella.

So Merry Christmas everyone!!

The day after Christmas, we packed up and drove to Houston. Hrishi had some work and we took the opportunity to make a mini family vacation out of it. It was fun exploring around Sugar Land and the surroundings areas. The Museum of Natural History of Sugar Land was a big hit. We saw lots of petrified wood, rocks, dino skeletons and many other interesting and cool things (like this beautiful creature here! :-) LOL! :))

I was able to squeeze an arms workout in on the go, lucky me!! Ha-ha!

Did some fun science experiments and just had a good time hanging out together.

Found some nice parks with playgrounds, as the mall was obviously not Ella's favorite hang-out place! Gosh, I wonder why?! It's so fun for me!!! :) We watched a couple of movies, and enjoyed the very nice warm high 60s and low 70's temperatures in Houston!

For New Year's Eve we showed mom and dad the Arts District in Dallas downtown then came home and prepared for the party. Ella put up an amazing show with some great dance moves, she was on fire. We prepared pretty much all the food after coming home so we were cooking and eating up until midnight when the Big Ball dropped.

New Year's treats: good food and Ella's amazing dancing. Note that she wore her Thai/Chinese costume sent by Aaji (grandma who traveled to Thailand in the summer) and listened to Chinese children's songs on You Tube for a good part of the evening:

Then on Monday we took it to the roads again and went to an Oklahoma wilderness park. Saw lots of beautiful and strange animals, all oh so friendly to the point where they almost jumped into our car. Needless to say that Ella loved feeding them and talking to them, taking pictures of and with them, etc.  

Whew, I'm finally done! Loooong post, I told you! Now I can prep this the 2011 blog book for printing!! Yeay!!! Now on to 2012!!

Happy New Year Everyone!! :)