a special prayer

Please keep my friend Liz and her family in your prayers this season as they mourn the loss of her mother, who passed away this week. Liz is also doing an amazing job at taking care of her father who is in ailing health. Thank you for remembering them.

the promise

We are using this book for our advent lessons this Christmas. This week we learned about God's promises to us and what a promise is. We were to make a promise to the kids to do something fun later in the week...something they could anticipate eagerly. That is amazingly hard. Nothing like making a promise then having to keep it. Ours was to make the traditional gingerbread house. If I hadn't made a promise, there would be no complications...but with a different kid sick each day. added to our daily trials and tribulations...this was somehow going to teach me a lesson. (Mainly, to keep my mouth shut, and not make any promises.)
We were finally able to get the kit (you didn't think I was making this from scratch did you?) and Dad helped them with this. I only heard one naughty word while trying to get the house to stick together. But I wasn't there for the decorating part.
When I saw it later, it was astonishingly perfect. I found out from the kids, they weren't allowed to do the icing. Why? Did something happen? I can only imagine. But they were all very proud of it when I got home, especially Juan Pablo.

chestnuts

I've never roasted them on an open fire....I don't even think I'd ever seen one before the other day in the grocery store. They were 3.99/lb. and I bought three...not pounds but three nuts. They are quite heavy I might add. We used them to make this craft for our study of German traditions.
Juan Pablo drilled a hole in them and we stuck a pipe cleaner through to hold the crepe paper. They fly awesome and make a nice whirring sound going through the air. The kids had fun trying to make it into the hula hoop basket...but I'm thinking there could be other games we could play with these.
Tomorrow, we'll finish up Germany by writing a letter to the Christ Child sprinkled with sugar, and making a recipe of lebkuchen.
Froehliche Weinachten!

December plans

Monday was more crazy than usual. Isabela woke up sick and threw up twice and Diego has figured out he doesn't want to be too far away from me. Top it off with all the plans I had to get back into homeschooling after the holidays and I just couldn't believe how the week was starting off. I called JP leaving him a crazed message of what was going on and how "the kids are going to just have to start going to school because they're not learning anything here." (I think I've done that at least twice since we started school this year.)
At some point, I relaxed...I realized if Isabela would have been in school, she'd have still missed the work...and I realized if she felt up to it later, we could still get things done. Joaquin, Diego, and I sat out of her doorway, and I read some of Hiawatha that the kids are fascinated with. I had checked one version out of the library, but also found an ancient version in the house that was my uncle's when he was a child. It is very captivating.
Our plans for this month center around Christmas, of course...we are learning about the Jesse Tree, which I just heard of this year...singing Christmas carols (we started with Silent Night...Isabela asked, "What's a virgin?" Good question, of course. I told her it is a young woman who's not married yet. What do you think about that answer?)...and learning about traditions and Christmas crafts from around the world. Our composer is Tchaikovsky and our artist is Degas. Speaking of Tchaikovsky, Isabela remembered that I told her I'd take her to the Nutcracker and, of course, Joaquin wants to go, too. I told him you have to sit for two hours and he said, "That's okay, I'll just bring a toy to play with, like my transformers." To which I replied, "I'm not paying $15 dollars so you can play with transformers.' Well... I hope I can get tickets for $15 dollars. Last year, I waited too long and there were no seats left in the inn.
We're making lots of crafts, also. Hopefully we'll get some keepers from ideas from all of these wonderfully creative people in the blog world. The others you may be receiving as a gift, so be forewarned.
A new thing we are trying this year is listening to an old radio program called the Cinnamon Bear...there is one episode per night until Christmas. I'm not sure how good it will be, but it's fun imagining a time when there was no t.v. You can hear it or other old radio programs at radiolovers.com.

the last straw

So, we gave up eating out about three weeks ago. There's always something that can make you change cold turkey. No, it wasn't the piling up of fast food cups and bags in my car. It wasn't having to move an old coke cup to replace it with a new one. We actually kidded ourselves into thinking we weren't doing it that much. But one night, we sat down and added up how much we'd spent at restaurants in just 15 days...a whooping $160. And to top it off, as I was throwing the last happy meals away from the car, I was appalled to see that the nuggets were not eaten, nor the apples! That was it.

So three weeks later, we've lost a few pounds each, and the kids haven't even asked to go to any restaurant! The key has been packing lunches if we ever leave the house after 10am...or snacks any other time...and remembering how much money we could have had, if we'd not spent it on what we like to call "crapola".

One other rule we've instituted to save a penny is only milk or water to drink. It's working well. (Although we do have a stash of Coke from Costco that I'm still finishing up.)

Thanksgiving

We stuffed ourselves silly once again. This year, I actually contributed...mexican spoon bread and macaroni salad...it was quite good, except for the hair my cousin found in his macaroni...probably wasn't mine, but still gross.


Diego had a great time with this drum...which was used as inspiration to teach him to crawl...he didn't get it that day, but TODAY has pretty much figured it out. Here we go!


Isabela had fun finding all the Japanese artifacts around Grandma's house...to go along with our study of Japan.


Jonathan entertained Diego with a napkin...until he started eating it.


And Diego joined the ranks of most of us....being strapped to the antique high chair with his Dad's belt.


I was a little ticked that our family had to sit at the kids' table in the kitchen...I said if I'd known that, we could have just ate at home...but it turned out fun. We were joined by some others on their second go rounds and played the Native American name game...some were pretty funny like Smelly Horse, Silent Skunk, and Balding Aardvark.

big sister

The kids have enjoyed their "big sister" this week. We had to take Daniela to the bus this evening and big tears were shed by Isabela. While she was here, we got to celebrate her birthday and Thanksgiving with her. I've enjoyed having her around...she reminds me of the days before kids... where you can eat as slow as you want...and you put things back carefully after you've used them. I hope we'll at least try to adopt the latter as a new habit.