The Peanut Gallery

Today was the long-awaited Spartan Race! We found out that there was a "Junior Varsity" Spartan Kids Race, and Duncan was pumped to get to participate! He's been training alongside Daddy from the very beginning, and he was dying to get to see it in action! He was very excited when we got there...he could really feel the energy! His age group was 4-8 years old, and because this was the first competitive event we had done with him, I was really looking forward to finding out how he did and how he reacted. If you know his parents, you know that he may have been given a healthy dose of competitive nature. Poor guy. He never had a chance. He was born into it. And we got to see it in action for the first time today. I was able to run behind him and help him with obstacles that were more difficult, and I tried to catch as much of it as I could on video! Enjoy!

In the picture above, Duncan and I were on a bus on the way up to Wintergreen. It took us 2.5 hours to get from Waynesboro to the top of Wintergreen, but it was totally worth it. In the picture below, we had just gotten his race uniform on, and he was so proud! :) It was in the mid 70s, very foggy and cloudy, but it was good race weather for Mommy!

Showing me his muscles...

This was at the end of the race...he got his medal (he called it his "trophy")!

Victory!!!

He had so much fun that we went back through and did it again! :)

The mud pits were awesome.

After he ran his race, we got to sneak down the mountain and greet daddy as he came up the mountain!

And then Duncan ran alongside him and cheered him on through 100 yards of barbed wire..

and into a mud pit...

and under the nasty water...

The true Spartan grimace...

Up the ropes to ring the bell...

Up another rope wall...

and jumping over the fire pit to race across the finish!

The whole team...

Spartan and Spartan Junior:

The college buddies:

The Irish twins:

And the BRCF crew:

It was an awesome day...and they'll do it again next year! Thank you to Nonni and Papa, who had an adventure day with Whit so that we could have this experience. It was a day we won't soon forget!

So, you know our Aunt Beanie is a fantastic photographer...here is her work for our Christmas cards/annual family pictures.

Mommy says she really caught my attitude in this one:

We had so much fun!

We actually took these pictures before Thanksgiving dinner, but we wanted to wait to post them til after everyone had gotten their Christmas cards. Mission accomplished, huh? Geez, Mommy. You overshot that one a little.

We had a ton of adventures in the month of December! The very first day of the month we went to Richmond with our cousins to see Thomas the Train! We were so excited...we thought we were going to see the real Thomas, on the tracks and everything...

We waited and waited in line, and we turned the corner to see this:

Mommy and Aunt Ali were laughing so hard they couldn't stand it. All that hoop-la for a cardboard cutout. At least there were some model trains for us to watch!

It was very cool to watch all of the trains going around and around. Elias and I really liked it!

Decorating the tree is always a real event in our house. One of the great unknowns is how many lights on the "pre-lit" tree will decide to work. This year was a little bit of a disappointment:

Oh well. Good thing we had extras.

If you know my dad, you know he likes to have the tree spatially organized. All shapes, sizes, colors, textures must be distributed evenly across the tree. Then we happened.

And Daddy was about to have a heart attack.

He did let us put them up where we wanted, then he re-arranged them after we lost interest. We didn't take it personally.

Unwrapping each one was like a present!

Our next grand adventure in Richmond was the Botanical Gardens Gardenfest of Lights. It was so cool! We had never seen that many Christmas lights!

And, to our delight, they had model trains here too!

Can you see the whole White Family through the glass?

Lincoln liked the trains too!

Look at that amazing detail!

Here we are at Bass Pro Shop for our annual torture trip to see Santa.

Lincoln knows what is about to happen:

The calm before the storm:

We totally roped Uncle Van into coming to this one. We promised him sweet bread from the Bass Pro Shop restaurant.

When we got inside, we found out that Santa wasn't there and wasn't going to be there for a few more hours! Mommy and Aunt Ali were so happy...we got to play in Santa's workshop without actually seeing Santa! (Backstory...we cry every time we see him. And Mommy doesn't really know how to incorporate him into the Christmas season yet...since we all really want to keep the focus on Jesus. Mommy is just happy she and Daddy still have time to figure it out.)

Do you see the elf sticking out of the snow? We were very concerned, and went straight over to help him as soon as we spotted him. We thought it was very weird that someone would put him there on purpose. Doesn't everyone go over to try to help him?

We got to play with race cars...

And trains...

And ATVs...

Look at Santa's workshop! Aren't the decorations amazing?

Here's Elias shooting a play rifle at game...

And me too!

Here's Uncle Van cheesing it up:

And Mommy and Aunt Ali with the strangely placed elk:

Check out the countdown rings we made! We cut them, numbered them and stapled them! Then we took them apart daily to see how many days were left til Christmas!