Sleepover!

Last night Gracie had her first sleepover. She has had sleepovers with her cousins and grandparents before but this one was a milestone because it was the first time she has had a friend sleepover. It was a giggly, girly evening, which included nail-painting, game playing and bunkbed sleeping for Grace and Michayla. They let Evan play "Life" with them, even though he didn't get in on the nail-painting. :)

Pioneer day

Homeschooling is great but there are some things that you can only pull off with a bigger group of kids. Evan and Grace participate in a "learning centre" on Tuesday mornings with some other homeschooled children. They have started learning about pioneers in their class so the teachers planned a pioneer day. Everyone was asked to dress appropriately and bring an appropriate snack for the time period. Grace was sooooo ecstatic about having the chance to wear this dress with the apron, that Loni found at the thrift store. Evan was less than thrilled about the whole dressing up thing which is strange considering how often he wears costumes at home just for fun. His "that's not cool, I'm not wearing that" attitude gave me a glimpse of the fast approaching pre-teen years. :) I assured him that all the other boys would be dressed up too and he consented - very grudgingly. All that being said, they had lots of fun at their pioneer school day! Evan told me his favourite part was reciting the times tables the teacher had written on the board - go figure! :)

Hands out for the inspection before entering the classroom.The teachers did a great job of dressing up too.

Our New Year's

We have had people over for a New Year's Eve get-together every year for the last 7 or 8 years I think. This year, we had promised Evan the he could stay up until midnight so we only invited a few families with older kids and we thought we would make it a family games night. On New Year's Eve day, all 3 families let me know that they wouldn't make it because they had at least one child in their family who was sick! So we ended up having a nice games night with just our family, which was probably a good thing since we were recovering from colds too.

We played Rachel's Dora Old Maid game before she went to bed.

Then Grace chose Uno . . .
and Sequence.

After games, we read a chapter of Little House on the Prairie before Grace went to bed. Then Evan, Ryan and I watched "The Princess Bride" together. I actually missed about half an hour of the movie because I fell asleep on the couch but the boys woke me up just before midnight so I could say Happy New Year and watch the last few minutes of the movie. :)

Evan was so pleased that he stayed awake until midnight that we had to take this picture.
On New Year's Day we had a lazy morning and made pancake men with chocolate chip faces for breakfast.


I think I am finally caught up on my blogging now. I hope I have not made you all sick of looking at my pictures. On Monday we will start back to school and I will be very busy again so I won't be blogging as much but I will try not to get so behind that I have to do this many posts in a row again!

Nice visit with Sweet Friends

Thursday, Dec 27, we enjoyed a visit with the Naus and Hillson families (and the Elfords too for a bit.)

It was good to see Susan, Dave, Julia and Samuel while they were out visiting from Ontario. We're glad they were able to fit us into their busy schedule of family activities.

Here is baby Sam, who was very tired and just wanted to be fed and put to bed, never mind posing for pictures!

A big smile from precious Julia and grumpy faces from my lovely over-tired daughters. :)
Evan really wants to learn to play guitar so he was thrilled to see that Mr. Hillson has a guitar and some "mini-guitars" (ukuleles).

It was so good to see you - thanks for the lovely visit!!

A New Do

I have pictures of Evan and of Grace when they were toddlers sitting in the bathroom as I gave them their first haircut. For some reason that never happened with Rachel. Not the pictures, but the haircut. That's right, a four-year-old who has never had a haircut! Her hair just grew in nicely, with these adorable curls at the ends and I never felt the need or desire to cut it. But recently the curls at the ends of her hair have become tangles that reached to her bottom and I realized that the time had come for the inevitable.

So, on Thursday, Dec 27, we went into the hairdresser (I didn't trust myself to cut it straight) and Rachel got her first haircut. I don't think the hairdresser was really impressed with me playing paparazzi but oh well. :)




The bangs look really crooked in this picture but it's just because Rachel has a cowlick in front and the hairdresser didn't wet her hair before cutting it so her cowlick was really acting up.
She really wanted to hold the bag of hair that I saved.
So there she is. It took a couple of days for us to adjust to her looking so grown up but she is very happy with it and she says she wants to keep her haircut for a few days anyway! :)

Boxing Day

Boxing Day was a lovely morning so we bundled up and went out for a walk at Snicket Point - the kids' favourite place to visit when we are in Sechelt. They love to climb around on the rocks.

Rachel loves her Nana!

Heading home on the ferry.
The ferry line up we're glad we weren't waiting in. Thanks for making the reservation Mom!
The beautiful snow on the mountains as we pulled into Horseshoe Bay.

Christmas Day

Here is my traditional picture of the tree on Christmas Eve before the Christmas morning chaos happens.

Stockings first thing in the morning. Evan woke up before the rest of us and had his stocking unpacked before we all crawled out of bed. He had been told he was allowed to do that but not touch any of the presents under the tree until everyone was awake.
Evan was excited about his new Canucks gloves and toque and wore them most of the morning.
Grace and Rachel both got their own suitcases - not because we want to send them packing or anything! :) Grace was so excited, she went and put all her things in that she "needed" to bring to Nana's house that night.


No, that's not a barbecue Ryan's opening. It is the bird house that Dad built for us and wrapped with lots of padding so he could sent it down on greyhound. For some reason I don't have a picture once we finished unwrapping it. I think it's because I had to put down the camera and help Ryan since Dad wrapped it so well!
After opening gifts and having breakfast, we got packed up and drove off to catch a ferry over to my Grandma's house in Sechelt where Mom and Grandma were waiting for us.
Once there, we had another gift opening time.
Those of you who read my blog regularly may have noticed a pattern by now. At most major family events, I have pictures of Ryan where he has fallen asleep amidst the goings on. Christmas Day was no exception. :)
Christmas dinner with Mom, Grandma, and Grandma's neighbour Jo.
After dinner, playing Gracie's new Uno game.

There you have it, a lovely Christmas Day, and it even snowed a bit as we drove from the ferry to Grandma's house.

Christmas Eve

It is a Christmas Eve tradition in our house that the kids each get to open one gift. They wanted to open them as soon as they woke up but they waited patiently until Daddy got home from work about 2:00 pm.

This year we had tried something new and given them each ten dollars to go shopping and buy something for their 2 siblings. They each got a shopping date with an adult (Mom, Dad or Grandma) and they were very excited to buy gifts to give each other. There's not a lot you can buy for $5 but they were creative and really enjoyed the process of choosing things they knew their siblings would like.

All that is to say that on Christmas Eve they all chose to open something from each other. Rachel opened her gift from Evan - a yellow stuffy dog whom she has named King.

Grace chose to open her gift from Evan too, which was a mini My Little Pony.

And Evan opened the gift Rachel got for him - a plasma dragon, which he was very excited about.

The colouring is a bit weird in this picture because I had to lighten it so you could see what is happening. This is Evan and Ryan having a duel with the empty wrapping paper rolls at dusk on Christmas Eve. There were enough rolls for the girls to join in too but neither of them wanted to so the boys each got two weapons and they had a blast. Evan says he won!

On another note, it wasn't that dark out but my photos of them dueling turned out terribly dark. I tried the setting on my camera that is for nighttime shots but this is how they turned out.

I think I should probably read the manual for my camera and find out what is going on, but I'll gladly take any suggestions from those of you camera experts (or not-so-experts) who want to leave your hints in the comments so I can save myself the trouble of reading the whole manual! :)