The Parrillo Family

Just like in year's past, our little Elf on the Shelf named Goldie found his way into our home this season and the girls (and Frankie, too!) loved searching for him every morning and discovering what kind of shenanigans he has gotten himself into. Here's a post showing all the ways Goldie interacted with our girls during the 2013 Christmas season . And here's a post showing Goldie from the 2012 Christmas season. No post from last year?  What the heck?  We musta had a little baby to tend to instead of posting photos of our elf visitor, amirite? This year, there was some concern about Goldie being able to find us - after all - we had moved down the block out of our house.  Fortunately for the girls (and thanks to Auntie Sharon!), Goldie arrived right as the Christmas Season was kicking off. Enjoy some of the ways he's welcomed Christmas with us: Goldie arrived on an airplane with a scarf and hat to keep him warm in the blizzard! He celebrated St. Nick...

As we've done in the past, we're going to try to craft a bit of a review of 2015 for those of you who received our Christmas cards.  We - once again - put this family blog url on the card and for those of you curious enough, a summary is probably the easiest way to navigate this family site.  We hope that you all have a wonderful Christmas season and can't wait to celebrate even more milestones, holidays and traditions with all of you.    2015 was a great year for the Parrillo family.  Lots of transitions, including school (Kindergarten!) and lifestyle (homes!).  But through it all, our family of five has felt so fortunate to share our year with the people we love.   So...check out some of what we were up to in 2015: Milestones Frankie turned into a real 1 year old ! Eloise learned to ride her bike without training wheels Sadie went to her first day of Pre-K Eloise went off to full-day Kindergarten We moved out of our lovely...

As we always do, this year we went down to Braidwood to cut down the family Christmas tree with the entire Moran clan.  This year, however, we didn't quite have our 'house' to bring that tree back to.  ( See the post from late summer about the house !) But, thanks to my sister and brother-in-law, we did have a 'home' to bring it back to and enjoy during the Christmas season. We went with a Douglas Fir for the first time and both Ellie and Sadie LOVED being able to help decorate the tree with ornaments.  I'm posting this here so we can clearly document that Eloise was the one who put the Angel on top this year.  Next year, SD will get to do it! It wasn't a big tree - just six feet tall.  But it was a lovely tree.  And for the first time, two families will get to enjoy it and create memories around it.  And...to me?   That's preetay, preetay, preetay nice. We had to erect a fence around it becase Franke the Tank was hellbent on taki...

With Ellie turning six in a few days, she's starting to develop an interest in Legos.  Sadie is still into Duplos but loves building things along with her big sister.  We've given Ellie a few Lego sets recently (Elves sets) and I figured we should try to nurture this Lego phase as best we can, so I packed them both up in my car and took them out to Cantigny for their annual Lego Train Show. It was really awesome.  A huge setup with trains and towns and buildings all built out of legos.  The girls were awestruck, but as good consumers, what they really wanted was to head to the room where vendors were selling Lego sets so they could buy some themselves! We ended up with two new sets and some happy building engineers...

What stage presence?!? Here's Sadie really hamming it up at her Little Lambs Christmas performance as captured by one of our neighbor's camera.  Just look at those animated movements.  Nailed it, right?

This video of SD shows how happy she was while taking in all the Osborne Family Lights at Disney's Hollywood Studios last month.  But the video doesn't do justice to the lights.  They're pretty epic, but alas, this is the last year (for now) of them, so we're glad we were able to take them in. Here's a few more photos from the lights:

We made our way back to our happy place down in Central Florida in November where were able to do a bunch of things for the first time, hooked up with our good friends, and even had a little snow fall on us on MainStreet USA.  It was an awesome trip and I can't wait to get back again.  Yes...again.   Here's some of the highlights.   The Beef and I rode Spaceship Earth in EPCOT and I was able to position him during the beginning of the ride so the camera could pick up his face. We met our good friends and their kids at Hollywood Studios one night and had dinner with some characters in their Christmas best - including Santa Goofy! We also took in the Osborne Family Lights at the Studios.   Here's a post with even more photos and a video of SD dancing .   One of the things that we were fortunate to do was to be the one family that is chosen to decorate a Christmas tree at the Christmas store in Liberty Square in the Magic Kingd...