Thanksgiving adventures

The day after T-day, we made the oh-so-great decision not to get up at 2am for the fanatic early-bird shopping crowds. When I first started seeing ads for 4am openings, I thought...seriously, 4 am??? But was then shocked to see 2am and even some opening the night before! What???!!! So no, that was not us. We slept in until 8am and then decided to go into downtown Seattle to see the holiday lights and bustle of the city. But, since we were close to a few stores, I guess we did stop in to see what they had to offer. The crowds were still pretty overwhelming that afternoon, I can't even imagine what they would have been like in the middle of the night!

Before we left on Saturday, we went with the fam to the Cougar Mountain Zoo. For as long as they've lived in Issaquah, I never knew there was a zoo only a few miles from their house! It was actually a really quaint zoo (if zoos can be quaint :). There were tigers, cougars (of course), emus, wallabies and even reindeer. We braved the cold and wet weather and spent a few hours roaming around reading all the placards. I actually learned quite a bit about some of those animals! I'm excited to take Tristan back one day when he is a little bit older to fully understand what it's all about!

1st pic since becoming the "six of us"



And then after we got back on Sunday, we went to our yearly Christmas tree farm to pick out our tree. We've been going to the same place for four years after randomly finding it one year as we were driving around looking for Christmas tree farm signs. (There's more to the story here that I will not share at this time that involves an almost Nightmare Before Christmas kind of scenario - don't worry, we laugh about it whenever we think about it now :) It is definitely the Pleasantville of Christmas tree farms! Every single one of their trees is trimmed to perfection. Each time we laugh as we step out of the car and tag the perfect tree within seconds. There are no Charlie Brown trees here!

Laying claim to his first tree!