Visiting family in Northern Virginia over the holidays

Hopefully many of you have read our holiday letter earlier this month and were able to catch up on a few highlights in our life this past year. Since then we made our last and biggest trip of 2008, our 9-day visit to Northern Virginia, mostly spent at Hetal and Mausami's, Neepa's brother and sister-and-law, and especially with their new baby girl Diya, now about a month old.



Of course, cousin brothers Salil and Dev (Diya's big brother) acted as expected, rapidly alternating between fraternal bonding, goofing off together, and fights over toys ending in screams and tears, but they got along quite well.


Even though they had many meltdown-inducing disputes over the Thomas the Tank Engine trains you see above, they were both quite the model brothers to Diya, treating her with care and tenderness. Dev seems to have a natural sense of being a good big bro.



I'm sure the two will consider Christmas morning as the highlight of their time together. So many presents to unwrap! Salil's continuous requests of "more presents please" were, not surprisingly, answered with an continuous stream of more presents.


Grandma and Grandpa Doshi drove up for a couple of days from Charlottesville, and Neepa's cousin brother Sanjay and wife Pinky also drove down from New Jersey, so it was nice to have a good amount of family together (this also greatly contributed to Salil's continuous stream of presents - plus we had also brought along gifts from Grandma and Grandpa Shah in Chicago).

We also visited my cousin sister Vaishali and her husband Sulay (who also happens to be one of my best friends from school - we all went to high school together). He had a lot of fun playing with his "Foi" and "Fua".

It was good to spend so much time with family and friends. Hopefully we'll get to do something like this again soon.