New Years with Our Friends

Our friends Ryan and Nicole from DC moved to Berlin not long after we moved to Austin. After seeing them nearly every weekend for years, it has been a hard adjustment to mostly experience them through their blog and sporadic emails. So we were so excited when they were able to visit us in Austin as part of their Christmas trip to the States! Stella was quite ill (and Nicole, too, as it turns out...), so we weren't able to do it up as usual, but we enjoyed some very low key time.

They met Stella for the first time in person (vs. Skype).

She liked them.

We crawled around on Ryan...

We had floor time with Nicole...

We played with our new precious finger puppets from Germany!

The boys jumped into their gadget/tech-speak...

And in addition to other things, we enjoyed a lovely vegetarian meal at Mother's Cafe.

Man were we sad to see them go. Actual tears fell from my eyes. While it's fun to move off and start new chapters of life, it is so very hard to leave your friends. We have the promise of seeing our other friends in DC a lot because we go back several times a year, but it's hard to be separated by oceans. If we don't make it to Europe this year, our plan is to meet them wherever we can on their next trip to the US. But believe me, we are planning on seeing this Germany-place soon (beer...beer...yum...). Until then...we miss you guys! Thanks for coming!