...in a Winter Wonderland.

"Oh the weather outside if frightful, but inside its so delightful!"

Sometimes, life makes it easy to sit around and do nothing...

Despite the fact that Sarah and I are still finding our stride as parents, both of us still wrestle with the feeling that we should be "doing something" every day. Its a little odd to wake up each morning with the realization that all we have ahead of us are a few chores, a few dirty diapers, and staring at a sleeping baby. I mean, since we spent the better part of '07 packing our days with visits to Buddhist temples, overlong bus rides and arguing with auto-rickshaw drivers, the idea of staying in is, in a way, daunting.

But, luckily for us mother nature stepped in an dumped a couple of inches of snow on us over the weekend, dropped the temperature into the low 20's and gave us the perfect excuse to snuggle in and do nothing. (As if taking care of Stella isn't excuse enough.)

Now, Washington state tends to be the Mother Bear of the Lower Forty Eight. We aren't too hot like, say California or the South. But, neither are we too cold and prone to deathly cold-snaps like most of the Mid-West. Instead our temperature is just right. Well, if "just right" means 60 degrees, and soaking wet.

But, a rather uncharacteristic cold front rolled through on Saturday night and left our house looking like this...

Our house from the street the morning after the snowfall. Usually, snow like this will melt over the next 24 hours, but this time its mostly still there several days later.

A photo from our front window on the night of the snowfall. I had to use an extended exposure, and it gave some neat colors and tones ot the picture.

And, now it sounds like we are in for a second round of snow tonight or tomorrow... which should hopefully convince us to stay in through the weekend. Fingers crossed.

Still, that's not to say that we haven't done anything except take care of Stella. In fact, with her birth now three weeks behind us, we figured that it was finally time to start thinking about the holidays and buy a Christmas tree. So, bundling Stella up, we headed over to Capital Hill to purchase a tree.

Oops! Apparently, we thought that the ceiling of our living room was higher than it was! In our defense, it was so cold out that we LITERALLY bought the first tree we looked at.

The family poses in front of the newly decorated tree. (Notice the top is now sawed off.) I love the lighting in this photo though.

The whole family poses for a photo together on the couch. Apparently, everyone else decided to look at the camera while I looked at the tree.

Oh, and wonder why the cats look so well behaved? Notice the spray bottle on the coffee table! I kid! Sort of. Ah, Christmas Cheer!

Happy Holidays everyone!

See all of the photos [url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/tylerhill/sets/72157611256110313/]here![/url]