Christmas Eve

We woke up to about a foot of snow on the ground on Christmas Eve. It was so beautiful but it did make me a little worried about my Dad who was driving down from Armstrong that day.

Christmas Eve was a lovely relaxing day with Ryan at home. We had a late breakfast - snowman pancakes decorated with chocolate chips and whipped cream.

Our tradition is that the kids are allowed to open one gift on Christmas Eve. We usually do it in the evening but we've found it's kind of rushed with having an early dinner and going to the Christmas Eve service and then coming home, having them open their gift and trying to get them off to bed. So this year, we let them open their gift in the early afternoon so that they would have time to play with it. They all chose to open one of the gifts they had gotten each other.

Papa arrived safely and had fun decorating the millions of sugar cookies we had made.
As it turns out, we needn't have worried about having to rush off to church, because it was cancelled due to the snow. I was sad to miss the Christmas Eve service but we enjoyed a nice quiet evening at home.

Here's the tree, ready and waiting for the kids to wake up early Christmas morning.

Christmas outfits

New Christmas outfits - don't they all look spiffy? :)

Thanks Granny and Grandpa!

Gingerbread

Annual gingerbread decorating day - lots of candy, messy icing everywhere - sooo fun!

I forgot to take a picture of the finished product and now it has been broken into - so you'll have to use your imagination! :)

Pierced Ears!

A few months ago Grace started asking me about getting her ears pierced. If you know Grace at all, you will understand that she is a very cautious girl and so we talked a few different times about what it would feel like and who we knew that has pierced ears. She decided it was something she really wanted to do so I started looking into it and found out it was way more expensive than I thought, so I told her she had to wait until Christmas or her birthday. It was a long wait! Every night when I tucked her in, Grace would tell me how much she really wanted to get her ears pierced, so you can imagine how excited she was when we went in to get them done.

Here she is before. . .

during. . .

and after!

She was so brave, and very pleased with how pretty they look. She is suddenly tucking her hair behind her ears all the time so that people will notice her earrings.

A wolf, and villager and a stone statue

All three kids have been part of a homeschool class (called Resource Centre) this Fall, on Tuesday mornings. The last class on December 9th was a concert where each class presented some things they had been working on for the parents. Rachel's class sang some songs and said some poems. Rachel stood very still and looked very miserable throughout the whole thing. Grace used to do the exact same thing and she is actually really good on stage now, so we know there is hope for our shy little Rachel. :)

Grace's class presented 2 different folktale plays. Grace was in the one called "Stone Soup" and she was Simone, one of the townspeople. She did a great job saying her lines and putting her onions in the pot! :)

Evan's class presented 2 fairy tale plays which they also painted the sets for. Evan was in the one entitled "Two Pigs, a Wolf, and a Mud Pie," a tale of the three pigs, with a twist. :) He was Ima Wolf, the vegetarian wolf who narrates the story along with one of the pigs. He had a lot of lines to memorize and he did a really great job. He enjoyed it so much, he has decided to take some acting lessons in the new year.

If we can figure out how to get the video we took onto our computer, I will post it on here.

Christmas card picture

Yes, it takes this many poses to get one Christmas card picture that I can be happy with - thank goodness for digital cameras!!

Visit with Nana

At the beginning of December, the kids and I enjoyed a short but fun visit with my Grandma in Sechelt. We enjoyed our usual walk at Snicket Point but I didn't have my camera with me there.

On the way to the ferry, we stopped at Guildford mall to get the girls their Christmas dresses. They were so excited about their new dresses that they wanted to wear them and show Nana, so they danced around and pretended they were princesses. :)

November Summary

I'm trying really hard to play catch up on my blogging while we have a few more days of no school and Daddy home to help out.

So here is my summary of what we did in the month of November.

At the beginning of the month we did a science project that Evan has been begging to do - we dissected a cow eyeball! It was gooey and gross and so much fun. :)

Grace was adamant that she was not going to do it, but as soon as Evan and I started, she was in there like a dirty shirt! Rachel was happy to just watch and Ryan was thankful to have the role of photographer so that he didn't have to participate in the dissecting. :)

On the second weekend in November, I got to go away to a wonderful retreat at Cedar Springs, in Sumas Washington, with the ladies of our church.

Cedar Springs is a beautiful place, with lots of lovely trails to walk. We were afraid it was going to pour rain all weekend so we wouldn't be able to enjoy the great outdoors, but God gave us a gift - it poured when we were inside listening to the speaker, but whenever we had free time, the rain stopped!


I enjoyed spending time with lots of wonderful ladies, including some very young ladies.

There was plenty of time for seriousness and silliness!


Three tired roommates, ready to go home.


We love the dress-up box in our house!


Here's a few pics of a field trip we took to Fort Langley. It was a lovely day and there were special events in honour of "Douglas Days," BC's 150th birthday. You can't see it really well in this collage but they had laid a huge fabric map of BC on the ground and the kids got to place the rivers, mountain ranges, and forests on it. Then they learned about the settling of BC as they placed aboriginal lodges, pioneer forts, boats, and animals on the map too. Great hands-on learning.

"Art class" Doing some painting with our friends. :)

Ryan's birthday is at the end of November. This silly picture is because we got Ryan some dvds for his birthday but we wanted to trick him by wrapping them in disguise so we put one in a lunch kit and added some onions on top - Ryan hates onions. :)

The day after Ryan's birthday was a baby shower for 3 of my good friends who all had baby girls in October. I had fun making a pink onesie baby shower cake for them.

End of October

Oh boy, I don't know if I can ever catch up - I'm so far behind now. I'm going to try and do a quick summary of the highlights of the last couple of months.

Here's a few pictures from the end of October that I didn't post yet.

Carving pumpkins
And dressing up for Halloween - Indiana Jones, a horse, and the most adorable mouse I ever saw.

Party!

I'm doing these posts all out of order, but oh well, at least I'm getting them done. :)

Last Saturday we had a few little girls here for an animal-themed birthday party for Rachel. All the little girls came dressed up in their animal costumes and they were all very sweet. We coloured some animal pictures, made some puppets, played some games, and ate some lunch (meat and cheese, fruit and veggies, and animal crackers) and some kitty cat cake. Keeping the guest list quite small helped the birthday girl to not feel anxious, and her Mommy to not feel too stressed, so all in all, I think it was a success. :)

Evan took these pictures of the girls playing freeze dance and moving around the room like different kinds of animals.

Apple Barn

A couple of weeks ago we took advantage of a sunny Sunday afternoon and headed off to the Apple Barn. Unfortunately, so did half the population of Abbotsford! :) We still had lots of fun though. Evan had his friend Sam with us, and the boys spent nearly the entire time on the giant bouncy pillow. There are no pictures of them though because they moved way too fast!

We did manage to drag everyone away from the bouncy thing long enough to go on a hayride to the pumpkin patch

Lots of fun! Fall is a wonderful time of year!!