On the way out to Autumn's birthday party (see previous post) we noticed a carnival set up just off the interstate and a set of lights in the field next to it. It looked like one of those drive through light displays. We had seen it set up a couple years ago and meant to go by then, but never did. On the way home from the birthday party we saw it again and decided to try and find it.
Ginger used the iPhone to determine the location of the lights and found out they opened at five thirty. So rather than drive all the way home, and then turn right around and head back out we decided to head to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Our list of restaurants we can go to with Catherine's nut allergies is rather limited, but luckily Sweetwater qualifies (lucky for everyone else, I've never been a big fan of the food at Sweetwater personally) and it was even sort of on the way to the light show.
The light show is at Bull Run park (here's the link to their site). The entrance fee is $15. Too bad they wouldn't take the picture of the coupon on the iPhone for the $3 discount. I'm kidding, while I am known to be cheap we didn't even try that (mainly because we didn't know about the coupon at the time).
Sadly these photos don't really do the exhibit justice. They have lots of animated lights like reindeer jumping, toy cannons being fired over the road, Jack Frost blowing snow, animated penguins, etc.
The pictures are also seat of the pants so to speak since you're not allowed to stop the car as you drive through, nor are you allowed to get out for pictures, so all these were taken from the moving car (yes, that's my lame excuse for why they're only so-so).
I'm probably the only one that noticed that Santa's sleigh only has seven of the eight reindeer. There are actually eight shown, but one of them (by the red nose) appears to be Rudolph, so they're missing on of the originals (like I said, I'm probably the only one that looks for these inconsistencies, I suppose it's my comic book inspired need for continuity nature coming to light). Guess they forgot that Rudolph wasn't one of the original eight.
The carnival is at the end of the exhibit. Since it was pretty late (and it was getting a bit cold too) there was no way we were going to go to the carnival. But the fact that you have to pay the entrance fee to get in and then have to pay more for the carnival seems a bit extreme to me (I suppose it's possible there's another way to get to the carnival, but I didn't see it if there was one).
We hosted Pete over to our place again for another movie night. Tonight's feature film was the X-Files: I Want To Believe. You know what I believe? I believe this movie is a piece of crap. Oh hey, look, they made a joke about the possibility of George Bush being an alien. That's hysterical. So remember the first X-Files movie. That had huge explosions, crazy locales, bees, alien space ships buried in the arctic. Yea, this movie has none of those things. About half way through the movie I realized their hadn't been a single memorable scene location anywhere and the movie could have been completely filmed in some town. And the couple of times there are special effects they're so fake you feel like you're watching a made for cable TV movie instead of a full blown feature film.
It felt like someone looked through old reject scripts for the TV show and said, hey, here's one, let's use this to make the movie. And it doesn't even feel like they picked the best of the rejects. And then to top it off they decided to pick a script that had absolutely nothing to do with the underlying mythology the series created. Seriously, this whole thing is a waste. It does nothing to advance the whole mythology aspect of the series, it doesn't explain why even though Mulder got his closure with his sister that he's back to his status quo. I have no idea what happened to Scully's kid, but the kid seems to be out of the equation now. And I can't tell whether Mulder and Sculley are living together or just happened to hook back up immediately after meeting each other again.
Just to give you a feel for how silly this movie is, at the opening Mulder is supposedly a wanted man and off the grid. The FBI comes to Scully asking her to find Mulder and ask for his help. So after hemming and hawing Mulder decides to help, and apparently they have a helicopter come pick him up at his super secret off the grid hideout. Genius! The movie only goes downhill from there. If you drink the kool-aid Chris Carter is selling this was suppose to be a springboard movie to the next X-Files movie that would deal with the invasion scheduled for 2012 (which we found out about at the end of the series). I think it's a safe to say there's very little chance of seeing another X-Files movie after this.
For the first time in the past couple of years that I can remember in recent memory (actually it may have been the first time ever, I'm not sure) we had Christmas morning at home with just us. It came earlier than I would have liked since I don't think I got to sleep until almost two the night before (my sleep schedule has been a bit whack out recently). It didn't take long for the both kids to be up and ready to come downstairs and open present though. The present opening is best described as mild chaos as the kids zip from present to present barely having time to acknowledge one present before moving on to the next.
Quinn has asked everyone in the family for some form of Lego Batman toy. So he was expecting lots and lots of Lego. So rather than have him guess what all his present were we packed a couple of his presents with some Lego pieces from his existing sets. As he would shake them he would guess they were Legos and this threw him off enough that when the real Lego Rescue Helicopter was unwrapped he could no longer trust whether it was indeed a Lego item or not. In case anyone is overly worried that we crushed his hopes by doing this, one of the items he got in a faux Lego packing was his new MP3 player. Mind you, I'm still having trouble comprehending that my son has need of or even wants his own MP3 player. We didn't get him an iPod (despite the fact that he can be seen using an iPhone headset at the moment because we don't have headphones for him). We did get him a CD / MP3 player (that allows you to either play a normal CD or burn a ton of MP3 onto a CD and play those). He really seems to like it and we bought him a CD of his own with his "favorite band" Relient K (who I had never heard of before). Heck, I didn't even know he had a favorite band. But he really seemed to like the idea of having his own music since he kept it on and playing through most of the day. In addition to that Quinn also got a small Nikon camera (no, it's not the one I have, I still consider that one somewhat useful even though it annoys me at times). Rather Quinn's new camera was one of the low end Nikon Coolpix. The bad thing is it was still low end enough to use AA batteries and not have a rechargeable battery. We're going to try and fix that by having rechargeable AA batteries. Hopefully Quinn won't lose them or throw them away prematurely.
Catherine on the other hand ended up getting lots of Webkinz and Webkinz accessories. She really likes these, which doesn't seem that odd since a lot of kids like them, but she doesn't do the online stuff with them (not that she wouldn't, we've just never told her about that aspect of the toys). I think she just likes the idea of having animals and outfits. Surprisingly one of her favorite things was this Water Wow Dora book that is basically found several pictures of hypercolor (where as you move a wet brush over the picture it becomes colored, then goes back to black and white when it dries). She must have done this every time the pages dried. She also got some art supplies, some doodle books, puzzles and a bunch of other smaller items. And her big item was a Playmobil Helicopter to go with her Hospital that she already has. We're also hoping that Quinn will gift her his old camera, then she can have a camera of her own too.
Later in the day once the kids had time to play with their toys we let them open up some joint gifts. This looked like it was going to be problematic initially with both kids wanting to the primary opener, but between presents Quinn would go off and continue working on his Lego Rescue Helicopter. The joint gift were some board games and Wii Music, basically items / games we can play together as a family.
In case you're wondering about Ginger and myself and what we got, I totally dropped the ball and didn't get Ginger anything at all from me or the kids. I really had planned on going out and getting her something small, but that never really happened. Ginger had the kids get me the new Raving Rabbid TV Game for the Wii (which the kids love, so I like to think it's more of a joint family gift that just happens to have been given to me by the kids). And then on top of having the kids get me something she got me Dr Horrible on DVD. Just so I don't look like a complete heel though, I will say that Ginger and I both decided not to exchange gifts per se this year since we had both gotten several big ticket items prior to the holidays. She got a bunch of stamping supplies, some clothes, iLife for the Mac, and a new LCD monitor for her Mac (which admittedly was probably more of a belated Birthday gift than a Christmas present). Meanwhile I ended up getting a new desktop computer (since the one I had pieced together after mine crashed last year has never fully recovered). Sadly my new desktop came with Vista though (and it didn't boot either, but that's a story for another post). And despite all these commercials I see where people claim to love the Vista OS I can't say I like it at all so far (although I only have the Home Pro edition, maybe the Professional version is better).
Today was an extremely busy day. And not just because I hadn't done any shopping at all and needed to get some done (which I ended up never managing to accomplish). Today I ended up taking off from work (I already had all my hours for the week in by the end of Tuesday) and we planned on returning to Mt Vernon. The last time we were there was the Harvest Festival day which was insanely crowded and the line for the mansion was well over an hour wait. Ginger really wanted to go since they decorate the mansion for Christmas and between Thanksgiving and the New Year is the only time in which they open up the third floor of the mansion. Add to that the weather was decent and in the low 50 degree range (versus the freezing or below freezing of the past couple of days) and it seemed like a good time to visit.
We tried keeping it a secret from the kids as to where we were going, but unfortunately Quinn is getting to be really good about directions and could immediately tell where we were going from remembering the way we had gone last time. Once we got there the line for the mansion was really short. To the point where I hesitate to even call it a line. sadly for some unknown reason they don't allow any photography inside the mansion. I didn't question or try and circumvent the rule. So there are no pictures from inside the mansion. I'm a bit confused as to why they wouldn't allow non flash photography other than maybe they don't want to hold up the tours. Ginger seemed to think it was so they could sell more stuff in the gift shop. The Christmas / Holiday decorations inside the mansion were pretty weak. The decorations consisted of the dining room having some holiday food on the table and that was it. We were able to go up to the third floor though, so that was exciting (in lieu of having some paint that I could watch dry).
Once we were done with the mansion tour we walked around and checked out the riverside of the mansion. I have to believe the view is probably more impressive during fall or summer when there are actually leaves on the trees. Don't get me wrong, it's still impressive but I suspect if there was a bit more color it would be even more impressive.
After that we went and saw some of the surrounding buildings. Most of these have a description of the room and the events that would normally occur in that building. Quinn surprised both Ginger and myself after getting a bit ahead of us coming back and telling us how in one building was where the slaves had lived and they worked six days out of the week. He had read the information himself. And I know we shouldn't be that surprised by this anymore, but I'll admit to still being a bit taken aback when he does stuff like that. I was more impressed with the fact that he had read it and comprehended it versus just reading it. He has been doing very well reading and knows his words, but sometimes I've wondered if he isn't concentrating so much on reading the words that he wasn't getting the gist of what he read (I guess he's proved me wrong on that).
Over in the museum area (which we didn't go through this time, but did a fly by as the kids needed to hit the restrooms) there was a festive Mt Vernon made completely out of gingerbread. I'll admit it, I'm a bit impressed with the amount of time and effort that seems to have gone into this. I briefly considered the consequences of reaching out and breaking off a piece (nom nom nom), but decided the negative consequences would outweigh any brief tasty goodness.
On the way home everyone was a bit hungry, so we stopped for dinner at Mike's thinking we would just grab a snack. And while that's all we really did, it managed to fill all of us up enough to the point where no one really wanted dinner after that. This worked out pretty well since by the time we eventually got home it was getting a bit late and had we still had to do dinner the kids wouldn't have gotten to bed until pretty late. I had brief visions of us being like the family from The Christmas Story that goes out to eat on Christmas, but this was Christmas Eve and there were tons of other people out also. All things considered since it was Christmas Eve I really thought the kids were going to have a tougher time getting to sleep than they did. I was expecting them to be up for an hour or more calling us in or making excuses to stay awake, but they were both out pretty quick, guess all the walking today helped tire them out a bit.
Ginger and I hosted Pete tonight as we viewed Tropic Thunder. To be honest I really thought Ben Stiller had been on a downhill trend recently with just about every movie he put out being a bit worse than the previous one (I say this without having seen Night at the Museum yet though). So I'll admit to being a bit surprised at how good Tropic Thunder ended up being. I'm not sure whether it's the fact that they make so much fun of Hollywood or what, but overall a lot of the movie works. I will say I typically don't really like Jack Black, but found his character entertaining in this movie. In fact, now that I think about it I believe most of the really entertaining parts came from actors other then Stiller (Tom Cruise was hysterical and did absolutely fantastic in his role and Downey was really good too). Overall a pretty funny movie and way better than your average comedy (for completeness I should add that Ginger just thought it was okay and had the comment that it isn't really a girl movie).
Later in the day we had Ken and Amanda come over for a playdate, but I had no luck getting the kids to pose for a decent picture.
