Merry Christmas!!

What a wonderful Christmas! We headed down to Medford to celebrate with Erich's family and reunited with the AshPats (we missed Hilary & Laurel though!) The festivities began right away with cookie baking, shopping, playing with cousins and visiting with relatives. We watched so many Christmas movies and ate such great food -- it was a perfect week. Although we had our share of drama...towards the end of our trip, we got a call from the doggie daycare telling us that Olive was really sick and needed to go to the animal hospital. Turns out she's doing OK and recovering back home :)

All 7 AshPat cousins

Sonia enjoying her new Princess costume

With Nana and Papa

This wrapping paper looks more interesting to me...

Family Shot

With Great Grandma Sweetie

Merry Christmas!

Here are some more pictures from our trip. Enjoy!

Cookies!

A few weeks ago, we had a cookie decorating night with the Toppenbergs. Reilly & Sonia had a great time decorating/eating the cookies and frosting and Ivy watched on as she jumped nearby.

Christmas is in the Air...

Auntie Lolo (Laurel) came to visit for a weekend in November. And while she was here, we went to go see Reindeer at Swanson's nursery. They even had a camel!

Our tree is up and Santa's gifts seem to be accumulating underneath. We went to go see Santa a few weeks ago, but needless to say Sonia was not a fan of the visit. I needed to sit there with her, but even then she was ready to bolt.

Happy Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving we headed east to Michigan to spend it with Tara Kakki & Sitaram Babiya. Aparna and Scott and Amamma and Tata met us there and we all relaxed, ate and relaxed some more. It was a great family reunion! While we were there, we also got to see Ranjit, Stacey & Leela. Sonia loved having her big cousin to play with!

What a character!

At 16 months, Sonia has quite the personality and it is funny to see her come into her own. She is into making herself laugh, throwing tantrums (but only if she has an audience) and singing songs. Over the last several weeks we've had many visitors, but lately we have been enjoying some down time as we prepare for the holidays.

Best friends!

Future Starbucks employee?

Isn't this used for cooking?


Enjoying a tea party thanks to cousin Leela!!

Happy Halloween!

This year, Sonia was a little pig for Halloween. Our weekend started on Friday with a parade at daycare. All the parents and several co-worker friends came out to watch our little piggy! Check out the photo of Sonia and her friend Bear stop mid-parade for a hug!
Each Halloween, all the stores & restaurants in our neighborhood hand out candy to all the trick or treaters. So on Saturday, we joined forces with our friends from our Parents' Group and did the Queen Anne trick or treat. After getting lots of candy and doing lots of costume-watching, everyone headed home to our place for some food and fun. All of us have known each other since the kids were about 10 weeks old so it was fun to celebrate Halloween together for the 2nd time.
The weather was perfect - it was a perfect fall day - and I entered (and sadly did not win) the Farmer's Market Pumpkin Pie recipe. I think my pie at least looked the best and given that it was devoured by our friends after, maybe it should have won!!

Here are some more pictures from our fun weekend:

Ammamma in Seattle

Ammamma visited us (Sonia) in Seattle and chased Sonia around with the video camera one morning. (Sorry about the video quality, I had to shrink the file to upload it.)

Take 1: Sonia hugs Olive



Take 2: Sonia enjoys singing. (We've been meaning to get her "Twinkle-Twinkle" rendition on video for a bit. She sings it constantly! That and, "This Old Man, He Played One.")




Here's a fun pic of the jack-o-lanterns we made during Ammamma's visit. The "dog" jack-o-lantern is Sonia's, not Olive's.

Fall is in the air!

Our Fall has gotten off to a great start! To begin with, Erich's Grandma Ruth visited Seattle and we celebrated her 86th birthday together.













We also made a special trip to Medford for Frau Kemmling's Oktoberfest. Wow, what a party! Deepa enjoyed some warm brewed tea out of her Frau Kemmling beer stein (since she had a cold), but the rest of the family wholeheartedly embraced the end of summer in traditional Bavarian fashion (beer, pretzels and a bratwurst eating contest - see below). Hilary did a great job and threw an amazing party and we can't wait until next year. The AshPat family pictures were right out of the Sound of Music!











Family photo!












Nana, Deepa & Sonia











Erich came in 2nd in the Bratwurst eating contest!















Last weekend, we ventured our with Janice (thanks for visiting) to the pumpkin patch to celebrate Deepa's birthday...Carleton Farms was great, as the Toppenberg's had assured us it would be. We spent most of the time trying to get an official pumpkin patch photo, and Sonia had a great time going down the tube slide.

Congratulations Aparna & Scott!

We just returned from a week trip back east to celebrate the wedding festivities of Aparna and Scott! What an incredible week...I don't even know where to start. Aparna looked incredible and we are all so happy to welcome Scott and his fantastic family to ours :)

The week started with an easy flight...phew. Sonia did great on the flight and my parents were SO EXCITED to see her and see how big she'd gotten. We were first a little nervous about how Sonia would do with the 300+ friends and family in town for the big event, but she was a star! She participated by wearing several Indian outfits and constantly walked around "chatting" and hamming it up with all the people around.

We had a few days on the front end to relax and help prepare for the weekend. My Chalikakki (grandmother's sister) stayed with us at my parents which was awesome. Friends and family were in and out all weekend, dinner at the house every night (followed by the necessary night-cap) and a big brunch on Saturday morning.

On Friday, Aparna's best girlfriends and I showered her all day long, with a private cooking class, contstant toasts and henna. We were in NYC all day - and I have to say, I really enjoyed the girly day - no diapers, no stroller, and I even wore high heels all day!

Saturday was the Puja (Hindu prayer event) at my parents' house. The weather was perfect, the ceremony was awesome and we all ate great food and got to socialize with everyone. Our dear friends Janina and Alex came, so we got to spend some extra special time with them since we never get to see them!

Sunday was the BIG DAY! It couldn't have been a better day - and it all started off with an article, color picture and announcement about A&S's wedding in the New York Times! The wedding was incredible and Aparna looked amazing! I was proud to be her sister (and even got choked up during my Maid of Honor Speech - yikes!) Erich and I spent the night at my cousin Laxmi's place in the city after the after-party - the first time we'd done that together since Sonia was born. The real luxury was sleeping in...I had forgotten how nice that was.


















































All in all, it was definitely the wedding of the year. We literally took hundreds of pictures, so it was hard to choose which ones to post. Click on the link below to see a sample of some of the fun!

Viva Vancouver!

This past weekend was Labor Day, and with a 3 day weekend ahead of us with no plans, no visitors and nothing to do - we loaded up the car and headed up north to Vancouver, BC for the long weekend. Sonia's first "international" trip was a great one - we stayed in the center of everything on Robson Street and were out and about from the minute we arrived.

Ready to hit the road!

Breakfast at Granville Market


View from the market


Apparently the thing to do was walk through the pigeons who gathered on the plaza.


This girl doesn't stop smiling...she's eating a lemon wedge in this picture.

Seeing sharks at the aquarium. We were so close!

Mmmm...first taste of ice cream.