Shoe-dini

We went over to Sue's house yesterday evening for the traditional wintertime visit to the Bellevue Botanical Garden, which has an elaborate display of lights. It is garden-themed rather than Christmasy (which is fine with me): flowerbeds, wisteria arbors, oversized bugs, birds in the trees, that kind of thing. It's very well done. It's also very dark, very crowded, very hard to keep track of your children (not to mention your fellow grownups - but they have cell phones), and very, very cold. Painfully cold. We had properly bundled the kids, but not ourselves, and by the end of it my toes were stinging. Aaron's toes would have been cold too had someone in the crowd not said "Did anyone lose a shoe?" Dale immediately knew it was Aaron's. He's become quite the little shoe-dini.

Aaron was a huge fan of the whole experience. He ran all over the place touching everything and talking up a storm and pulling off his mittens and hat every time we put them on. Jordan enjoyed himself too, but was eager to get warm again. His favorite part of the evening was dinner at Grandma's, featuring ham and crock-pot mac and cheese. She was so happy to be hosting her grandchildren, and to be able to just have us over for dinner... her smile was the warmest part of the evening.