Coast to Coast!

We began in Cambridge, then onward!

 Conneticut!

 Illinois welcomed us to Chicago with a toll...  we felt somewhat unwelcome in our former state.

 Wisconsin welcomed us twice...

 ...and began the fridgidocity!  -5 degrees!

 -10 degrees!

 -22 degrees!

 Montana was all ablurr... a frozen, frozen sub-zero blurr

 A 737 following us to Seattle!

 The West! - Northern Idaho is beautiful.

 Um, that sign says "Welcome to Washington!"

 We made it to Sammamish!

 Time for a rest in the pre-couch apartment.

And we're done! West Coast Baby!

The trip was mostly uneventful, >3000 miles, 3 audio books, no flat tires, no gas-outages, and we only got pulled over once!  About an hour from Sammamish an officer noticed a headlight had gone out, but was nice enough to let us off with a warning.  Phew!!! 

28 Years Young

We're so lucky to have you in our life. Thanks for all you do!

Happy birthday!

Love, Kayla and Tiffany

We made it!

After four long days in the car, Braden and I finally made it across the United States. We got here a week ago and are starting to feel less crazy. I even made it to the grocery store without using the GPS yesterday (it took me over a month to accomplish that in Boston!). Our internet gets set up on Friday, so hopefully we'll be better at posting then!

Worth 2 in the Bush

For the finale to our awesome ThanksgivingChristmasNewYear’s celebration, we headed up to Tahoe with Tiffany’s parents to have some fun in the snow. We broke out the snowshoes and headed to a viewpoint not far from the cabin.  As we trekked through the snow we met a local gentleman that informed us we were on “Chickadee Ridge”, and that the chickadees would eat from your outstretched hand.  I tried it and sure enough, one of the little birds flew down from the trees and alighted on my hand – disgusted I’m sure because I didn’t have anything in my hand to offer.  Luckily our local friend had brought some seed with him and shared with us, and so I was able to redeem myself.  As per usual, Kayla fell asleep in the backpack, which is just as well I’m sure because while we planned on going out for only an hour or so, we had such a good time we stayed out for close to 3!

The next day we hit the sledding hill – Kayla is yet to be enamored with sledding.  I don’t think she likes the cold snow that kicking up in her face.  Tiffany, however, is completely in love with sledding (as evidenced by the picture below), so I’m sure its just a matter of time until Kayla-bear comes around.

Now the vacation has come to a close and we’re back to reality (sort-of).  I’ll be flying around the country touring manufacturing facilities for the next two weeks, and Tiff and Kayla get to hang out in California until it we move to Seattle at the end of January.

So consider this your warning 2011: You’re about to be seized!

HappyThanksgivingMerryChristmasHappyNewYear!

Admittedly, our blog has taken a back seat to the holiday season.  But now, with the "Big Three" holidays behind us, we can once again rededicate ourselves to the things that are most important, like the blog.  Tiff thinks it will be a good idea to make a bunch of posts and then post-date them to the time they happened, so keep a weather eye.  Until then I figured our loyal readership would want something other to look at than Kayla's Halloween costume.

Over the past few months, Kayla's been learning to practice the piano, Tiffany made some fancy cupcakes, Kayla fell in love with her bows all over again, I finished up my second semester at MIT (only 2 more and an internship to go!), we had a visit from Santa and Mrs. Claus and we've spent some much needed time with family.  Now, we're starting to get ready to start my internship - for those of you who didn't know we'll be heading to Seattle from February to August as I will be doing an internship with Amazon - and have been loving playing in dirt from Boston to Utah to California.  The adventure continues!!!

Our Little Monster

Kayla is currently in a stage that everywhere she goes ends up looking like Godzilla just ravaged Tokyo, but without the subtitles. As a result, we thought it would be fitting to dress her up as a little monster for Halloween.  Tiffany made her the suit - from scratch - and Kayla was the belle, er, monster, of the ball!  We went to the "Spooky Sloan" Halloween party at the business school, and after a few stops she had trick-or-treating down pat: show up at a door and take as much candy as you can out of the bucket while the person is distracted by your costume.  The performance was repeated at the church Halloween party later that night.

Perfecting the Technique - notice the lady's eyes, she has no idea how much candy is leaving the bag!

Look - I'm Little-White-Polka-Dot-Bigfoot!

That's quite the haul... you gonna share?

Happy Halloween!!

Leaf-Peeping!

I always called it "going to see the leaves" or "heading up the canyon".  But we don't really have any canyons around here, and they must have wanted a more whimsical name for the activity, so "Leaf-Peeping" was born in New England.  We went with our friends the Cutlers and checked out the fall colors in Concord (home of "The shot heard round the world"), enjoyed the sites and the history (that's the Old Manse in the heading of our blog) took a few family pictures.  We also found a pumpkin patch where the pumpkins mysteriously grew in perfectly straight rows, and the best pumpkins were at the front of the patch - somehow they knew to grow this patch specifically for families with strollers. Tiff right away found the perfect pumpkin, and K-bear took a break on a pumpkin before finding one of her own.

Earlier we went and checked out the Head of the Charles Regatta, because, well, we live on the Charles.  We live by the starting line, so we didn't see too much action, but there were a ton of rowing crews, and we were kept plenty busy keeping Kayla from jumping in the River - she's very adventurous.