Merry Christmas!

As usual, we had a wonderful Christmas day! We are are so thankful for our greatest Christmas gift - God's Son. We opened gifts, ate, played with our toys, watched movies, and hung out in our pjs all day. Since Ron is off all week, we're looking forward to a repeat performance tomorrow (minus the gift opening)!

Here are some pictures from today. (We've had 2 of our 4 relative Christmas celebrations already. I'll post pictures from those another day.)

Clara was a good girl this year and got lots of goodies from Santa. Danielle asked Santa to bring Clara a doggie bed, too.

Danielle had an American Girl Christmas. This is the Feel-Better Kit - because you never know when your doll might need a finger splint or crutches! (Actually, it's very cute.)

Tyler is learning how to play chess and requested a glass chess set for Christmas.

The item at the top of Danielle's list this year was the American Girl doll Rebecca....which is what this is.

Christmas Secrets - Revealed

We decided a few days ago that we would suprise the kids with the gifts Ron made for them before bed on Christmas Eve. Ron made Tyler a pen that has a toxic waste symbol on it and is swirls of black, green, and orange. (Tyler likes to doodle pictures that involve oozing vats of toxic waste.) I would love to post pictures of Tyler opening his pen and his wonderful reaction to it; however, his pjs don't cover as much as Danielle's. So, I won't be posting those. Suffice it to say, he loved his pen and his reaction was enough to make me a little teary.

Danielle LOVED her bed. She ran over to Ron and gave him a big hug. It was so worth the time and effort! She understands my lack of sewing skills and was appropriately impressed. She picked up the pillow and said, "You really sewed this?!" It was perfect.

Christmas Secrets

I had to share this because I am so excited about it! Ron made Danielle a bed for her American Girl doll. I made the linens for the bed, and they turned out surprisingly well in spite of my lack of skill! I can't wait to give it to her! (Santa is NOT getting the credit for this one!)

Basketball

Danielle's team won their first game Saturday morning. I can't believe how much fun it is to watch Danielle play! We enjoyed watching Tyler, but this is different. Danielle obviously enjoys it a lot more than Tyler did. Today was picture day, too. I was trying not to get in the grumpy camera man's (aka photographer's) way, so I didn't get a picture with her actually looking at me. Here are a couple pictures from her game, too. Once again, I was lucky enough to have my camera out and ready when she made a basket!

Yes, You Can...

...teach an old dog new tricks. I guess it's especially easy if the "old" dog is only 2 1/2 and the new trick involves an activity that breed is well known for.

Anyway, this is what we've been working on with Clara.

We only get the paper on Saturday & Sunday, and this is only the 3rd week (so, 5th time) we've worked with her. As you can see, it didn't take any "work" on my part at all this time. She is so smart!

Baton Performance

Wednesday night Danielle's baton group performed at a retirement home in our town. At the last practice the kids made cards to hand out to all the residents after the performance. I wanted to tape this performance since something happened to our video from their performance a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately this is really not a good representation of the routine. The room was small, so the group had to split into 2 groups to perform. (We have almost 40 kids in our group this year!) Even with that the girls were crammed into the room rather haphazardly and had a hard time keeping in sync because they couldn't really see each other.


Danielle is the 3rd one in, and she is on cue most of the time (despite the girls beside her). I cut the video off about half way, but the routine just repeats for the most part. Some of the better girls usually do a "trick" at the end where they flip the baton between their legs and over their hip, but there wasn't enough room for them to do that here. Danielle is one of the girls who is supposed to do the trick, but she's about 50/50 on it (as are most of the others).


The residents seemed to enjoy watching the girls, although the staff was rather grumpy about having to put a little extra effort into their evening routine. (For that reason, we'll give this home only 3 stars and will cross it off our list of potential possibilities for our retired loved ones.) :)

A Winner!

Today we had the pleasure of attending another handwriting award ceremony at the elementary school!


Danielle's teacher contacted us last week so we could make plans to attend the assembly. We were not allowed to let her know she had won, though. She was so excited about the contest, that it was a little more difficult to keep the secret from her than it was from Tyler. She asked me several times if the school had called. Thankfully they had emailed, so that was an easy question to answer. In a last ditch effort to figure out if we had been contacted she said, "I know you're not supposed to tell me if I won, so I just want you to tell me if I should be more excited or less excited." We must have played our roles well because she was convinced when I dropped her off this morning that she hadn't won.


This was her expression when she walked in to the assembly and saw us sitting there. It was so worth the effort of keeping it from her!











She came in 2nd place for the 2nd grade girls and was pretty proud of herself. We are proud, too.

O' Christmas Tree

We finally put our tree up this weekend. We made a day of it yesterday and went out to a movie and dinner before hand. (We saw The Muppets. If you haven't seen it yet, don't waste your money! I thought it was painful, but the kids enjoyed it.)

It was really cold last night, so we were rather quick about finding the perfect tree. We bought the first tree Tyler & Danielle both agreed on, and we found it in under 5 minutes. Not bad! We set it up last night and decorated it today.

It's nice and tall. Ron is standing on a chair and Danielle still had a difficult time reaching the top.

We had a nice day together yesterday and fun decorating it today. The kids couldn't wait to put their gifts for each other under it.

Danielle's Busy Day

Danielle's baton group performed at our town's tree lighting ceremony tonight. We have so many girls in our group this year; there was hardly enough room for them all to line up. Danielle was front and center again! (Being in the front row is quite the privilege.) The girl next to Danielle bumped her and knocked Danielle's baton from her hand within the first few seconds of the routine. Danielle quickly recovered, though, and did a great job. She put a lot of time and effort into practicing for this, and it showed. I'm proud of her.

Later tonight Danielle played in her first basketball game. Kids Danielle's age play in an instructional league, where you can't steal the ball from someone's hands, the coaches double as the refs, and the players wear color coordinated sweat bands so they know who they're guarding. Considering Danielle's team only had 2 practices prior to this game, it's probably a good thing they teach and learn as they go. Danielle had a blast! She ran her butt off, guarded her guy, and even scored once. It was really fun watching her!

Christmas Countdown

30 Days Until Christmas!

Our Bake Sale Contribution

I'm pretty sure we're caught in a time warp over here. The days have been speeding by lately. It's the middle of November and this is only my 4th post! We have just been incredibly busy with, well, being a family of 4 with 2 grade schoolers. I am looking forward to Thanksgiving break at the end of next week! No work, no school, no doctor's or dentist's appointments, no practices of any sort for at least 3 days, 5 if you include the weekend. Sounds wonderful.


This Saturday Danielle's baton group held a bake sale to help raise money to purchase more lights for our community's Christmas tree. They performed at the tree lighting ceremony last year and will again this year, too. Danielle made turkey cupcakes. We boxed them up into little boxes and they looked so cute! They were a hit and all of them sold within the first hour. If we have time, I think we'll make some for our Thanksgiving feast, too.


















We took a break from some of our home improvement projects this weekend to run to the hardware store and then out for dinner. The kids were hungry and that tends to make them cranky. They were just picking at each other. That night we had several conversations about treating each other the way you would want to be treated...not the way that person deserves to be treated. It really is a hard lesson. Danielle is much quicker to bestow grace than Tyler is. He's more of an eye for an eye type of guy. He's also a bit of a smart mouth. While we were in the check-out line at the store I saw him get up in Danielle's face and blow in her face. When I yelled at him about it, he quickly pointed out that Danielle had done it to him first. When I reminded him of our earlier conversations he replied, "I know, Mom. Since she treated me like that, I just figured she wanted me to do it back."

For the Birds

This guy landed on my fence this morning. I had just refilled my bird feeders a little earlier and had lots of birdy activity in my yard. I'm pretty sure he was looking for breakfast, but he flew away empty handed (taloned).

I took these through the window, so please excuse the fuzziness. That last picture was just a split second away from being an amazing picture. Oh well. I posted it because you can really see how big his talons are, though. Scary!

I stole a couple hours for myself on Saturday and went to the park. There weren't any birds (other than a couple robins) and the only wildlife I found were squirrels. I don't know where everything was hiding, but it was rather disappointing as far as picture taking goes. It was nice to enjoy the beautiful day outside by myself for a few minutes, though.

Irony

The instructor for the Lego Club at school finally installed a piece of software that Tyler recommended last year. Yesterday she called Tyler out of class and had him teach her how to use it. She was so impressed with his knowledge that she asked him to come to Lego Club today to teach some of the other students. (Tyler decided not to join Lego Club this fall because he felt there were too many kids for the amount of Legos they have.)

When I went to pick him up this afternoon, the instructor stopped me and told me what an amazing job he did. She said he stood in front of approximately 40 of his peers and delivered an excellent presentation and demonstration of the software. She was really impressed and said she'd like him to return the next few weeks to help out. On my way to find him (he was still on the computer), two other adults stopped me to praise Tyler. I was really proud of him.

On the way home he told me all about it. As he was winding down he said, "You wouldn't believe how hard it is to teach a bunch of kids who are talking, crinkling their mini-oreo wrappers, and chewing with their mouth open. Then they all seemed to decide they needed to get up and throw their trash away at the same time." At this point we were getting out of the van. I caught his eye, we looked at each other for a moment, and then we both started laughing. One of the most common complaints about Tyler's behavior at school is that he won't stop talking or making noises.

The irony was not lost on him.

All About Me

Danielle was the All About Me student last week. She had to complete a couple papers telling about herself, her family, her pets, her likes, dislikes, etc. She also completed a couple papers telling about her favorite memory (Washington DC), her dream vacation (Australia or Africa), etc. She displayed one of her baton trophies and the photo albums from a couple of our vacations. At the end of the week she brought in a special snack. She picked sugar wafers (probably because I never buy them). She has been waiting for her All About Me week since the first day of school!

On Friday I was helping at the school and walked into her classroom while she was presenting everything to the class. (She was using a little pointer and looked so cute.) After Danielle's presentation, the other kids in the class wrote letters to her. The teacher laminated everything, put it all in a book, and sent it home today. Some of the letters really made me laugh. I thought I'd share a few. (Click on the pic to see it larger.)