TRADITIONS

Slowly, but surely we are creating our very own family traditions. For instance, each year we celebrate Easter with a fantastic seafood dinner (usually five courses for eight adults, the maximum that will fit at our dining room table). We also reserve each Thursday night as our "date night". Obviously this has changed dramatically in the past two months, but we were still able to get out to a fancy dinner in DuPont about a month ago when my mom was in town and willing to babysit. Our dates will look different in the weeks, months, and years to come, but we are hoping to keep the tradition of Thursday night date nights - even if we just get an hour or two together after the little one is asleep and can watch a movie together.

[Side note: Our first Thursday night date night was Inauguration Night 2004. Our four year date night anniversary is quickly approaching!]

Back to traditions... with Christmas quickly approaching, we are thinking about what traditions we'd like to build with our family. We plan to make it a tradition (this will be our second year) to visit all of our neighbors the week before Christmas and give them a holiday treat. This year we will be preparing an assortment of sweet breads - banana, lemon, pumpkin, and a cinnamon sour-cream, white chocolate peppermint crunch candy, and chocolate covered pretzels. Last year we had a wonderful time visiting with neighbors and spreading some Christmas cheer. We also have taken the time (this year will be our third year) to visit the Botanical Gardens during an evening before the holidays. It is beautifully decorated and in the evenings they have live music. And we usually run into someone we know while there, which is always a pleasant surprise. We're planning to go again in two weeks.

Besides that, we don't have any traditions YET... I think this is a good start, but I'm looking forward to building more traditions with my family.

Do you have any good holiday traditions you'd like to share with us?