Some Christmas Music

In high school, the vocal music department would sing this song every year for Christmas with the alumni coming up to take part with the students. Obviously we never sounded quite like this group but it brings back fond memories.

 

Chasing after Christmas

 

One thing you can always count on, December will keep you on your toes! There are always so many different things going on that its all you can do just to hang on for the ride.

As it continues to snow outside the odds are looking increasingly good for a white Christmas. Maybe Santa will even have a place to land his sleigh. He came to visit a week ago to much excitement.

 

Not withstanding the kinda freaked out look in this picture, Gabe thinks that Christmas trees are awesome. The legs that you see belong to Laura. Since Karla and Laura were doing the lion share of the decorating we needed to get the ornaments past 3 feet high because Gabe has very long arms.

 

 

What would Christmas be without some cutting out and decorating of sugar cookies. These tasted wonderful and disappeared much faster than the mess they made.

 

If the upload works, Megan has a solo in this Christmas song at the very beginning. She's been working on singing louder but my camera had a little trouble picking her up. Gabe was sitting on my lap and he had behaved beautifully during all the performances until we finally reached the junior high choir, which is last. Then he decided to add a little music of his own. Which is my excuse for taking a wiggly video of the back of a head!

Do you know what happens when I try to fill out Christmas cards? With me standing 5 feet away and trying my best to ignore them, Karla and Gabriel ransack my cabinets. Those of you who receive Christmas cards before Christmas know that you are one of the lucky few. Everyone else...they're coming...I hope!

I hope you enjoy looking at our fun as much as I have enjoyed sharing it with you!

A Christmas Concert

With the anticipation of Christmas begins concert season as the girls give us the first installment of what they have been learning so far this year.

Malissa has slipped to the top of the list with her 5th grade band playing this evening. And whaduyaknow but the camera battery died as soon as I pulled it out of my pocket. To the rescue was the camera phone.  Just know that it has no zoom so the cropped result is just a bit pixelated.

5th grade band is in its first year so they kept things simple. Proud of the hard work my flute player has put in.

A Sweet Fall Day

Known to be chill and blustery, today December defied expectations. The temperature made it into the 60's today! This was, go run around outside and play, weather.  So that is exactly what we did.

I made many attempts to get a picture of Gabe but I had to finally give up.  Every time I let him go to snap a picture, he would pick something gross up and stick it in his mouth. 

However, here is a picture of Karla and Gabe playing together in the slightly  more sanitary environment of the house.

I have finished reading Inheritance by Christopher Paolini. If you are not familiar with this book it falls into the fantasy genre and is the final installment of a 4 book series. It was a pretty good book and I enjoyed reading it.  Mostly I think my satisfaction with the book is more relief to finish the series that I started maybe eight years ago. 

Somewhere or other I heard that you are supposed to regularly challenge yourself in order to continue improving.  I've decided to apply that to cooking right now. I have never really entered the realm of cooking candy before now.  It is all very temperature dependent and much more precise than my current methods. But armed with a candy thermometer and a recipe that looked fairly simple I decided to give it whirl.

I forgot to take a picture until after I had broken it up and put it away but since this isn't a food blog I don't plan on learning how to take good food pictures. Anyway this is the toffee I made. And it tastes good too.  I'm calling this a success.

I hope all of you who were able had a chance to enjoy the balmy weather.  I understand it will be short-lived!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy end of Thanksgiving weekend everyone! Tomorrow we send the kids back to school and we have started the countdown to Christmas.

It also turns out from all of our merry making this week I have a picture taking fail. For the most part I simply forgot to take them.  How about we just call it enjoying the moment instead of recording it!

The Saturday before Thanksgiving the Deters family (us) hosted the Thornton family (Charlie, Julie, Greg) for turkey yumminess. Its so much fun to see Greg.  He has discovered the benefits of having cousins to play with and all of them had a fun (exhausting) time playing together. Charlie and Julie we loved having you over.

On the big day our family made our way to John's parents house. We stuffed ourselves on food and family before rolling our way back home.

Today on the first day of advent we lit an advent candle and read a little verse.  I did take a picture but it turned out very blurry so I decided the picture thing would just continue to not happen.  Also I haven't gotten my advent wreath out yet so hopefully we will get our act together soon.

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!

This is playing on repeat in my head.

Summer Vacation

Today I unpacked my new keyboard for the computer so in celebration of the rediscovery of the ability to type I feel it is time to post vacation pictures.

In the early part of August we packed everyone into the car and drove for Colorado Springs.  All the times we spent in Colorado growing up we just drove through this area. It turns out there are quite a few things to see.

I imagine this is the most photographed sign in Colorado.

We managed to navigate our way into Woodland Park with only one child losing their afternoon snack all over the car seat. So that evening we took in the Cave of the Winds.

The girls were fascinated by the cave and Gabe put up with it for a while. Until…well he decided he didn’t any more. Fortunately the tour wasn’t too long and we saw a lot of impressive cave formations.

The next day we headed to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.

Apparently they are well known for their giraffes and you can interact with them quite a bit. The staff hands out pieces of lettuce which is a favorite food of these long-legged critters and you feed the lettuce to the giraffe.

At one point in the day we stumbled upon some face painting teenage docents and Laura

and Malissa availed themselves (read begged.)

By the middle of the afternoon everyone was hot and completely exhausted so we headed back to the hotel.

Once everyone had hydrated and rested (it turns out being rested is a big part of surviving a family vacation)  we headed out for Garden of the Gods.

Erosion has created quite the fun place for the kids to scramble around.

The next day was off to Santa’s workshop. This was completely new to me but I have to say I really liked it.

The rides were aimed more at the Laura’s age group (it was a good thing Karla had a growth spurt this summer because she was just big enough to participate some.) But there were some things there for the older ones to ride as well.

I’m not sure how Megan squeezed in but she managed!

Once she got over her shyness Karla had a ball!

After lunch we had to call it quits since it began to rain on us and was showing no signs of stopping. Just a note on the rain.  It rained every…single…day. But we never encountered the torrential rain Colorado is cleaning up from right now.

Also it was during the rain that we realized what an awesome hotel we were staying at.  We were staying at the Eagle Fire Lodge and the initial attraction is it had the capacity to sleep all of us in the suite and the kitchenette had a pretty functional kitchen with room to move around comfortably. But the best part about this place was the games they had in the room.

There were a whole pile of them such as Lincoln Logs but also Monopoly, PayDay and a whole slue of other games and we played every one when ever we had some down time or were hiding out from the rain. 

The next day we headed home to dry out. Hope you all enjoyed seeing a little bit of our vacation!

Ka-BOOM!

Let’s play a game.

You know those picture games where you compare 2 pictures and try to figure out what is different from one to the next.

I’m no good at that game. I always seem to have one object that I just cannot find.

But today I want you to play that game with me. I’m sure it has a real name but I can’t think of it and I refuse to Google it right now.

Anyhoo…take a good look at the below picture of a section of our farm. I took this picture standing in my front yard this morning.  Carefully study it…

Now look at the next picture taken about 20 minutes later. If you have really sharp eyes you may be able to spot the difference.

And of course a shot of the miscreants surveying their handiwork.

Two down one to go.

“The specialist birthday”

The title of the this post is what Laura has been calling her birthday for the last couple of days.  She loves that she can shoot fireworks on her birthday.

And yes my little firecracker turned 5 today.  Old enough for kindergarten this coming year.  There will only be two left at home…

Purple is her favorite color.

Additionally there may have been some firework shooting happening.

We had some visitors over to help us celebrate. Julie generously pulling Karla and Greg in our decrepit wagon.

At the end we had to go looking for Karla and discovered she had crawled into bed.  So she missed the last of the fireworks. After this picture was taken Gabe also announced that he would no longer tolerate anything that didn’t end in his bed.

Happy birthday to Laura and hope everyone had a good 4th!

A Fun Evening

This evening  it was time for a little R&R with the kiddos. So we spent some quality time at the park.

Megan has started to think that she can’t do that “kid stuff” any more.

But apparently swings don’t apply.

All the options at the playground and 60% of the time was spent on the swings including Karla who has to find her own way.

We also found this bumble bee.

Laura has been asking for a week to go to the park.

Can’t forget the adorable Gabe picture.

We topped it off with a late evening trip to the pool.  We almost had it to ourselves.  The older sisters didn’t stick around close enough to get their picture taken.

Ended the day with some very tired children.  I was glad for the chance to go play for a while.

Part 1 of Summer Concluded

Softball came to an end this last weekend for the Deters family.

On Saturday, Malissa’s team lost their game in the tournament.  They were showing a lot of improvement in the last few games of the year and played right with their opponents but couldn’t quite pull it out.

Megan’s team finished their tournament run on Sunday playing a very exciting game and very nearly upsetting one of the top seeds.

So proud of the contributions and improvements that both girls have shown this season.

After the storm and cleaning up

The Deters Dairy had some interesting weather on Sunday evening. 

As we were eating dinner all of a sudden the wind came up fast and I saw cardboard flying past the windows.  John saw a calf hut go flying and we all ran for the basement.  As we were heading downstairs the wind threw something against the window hard enough to break it. We stayed downstairs for a few minutes until it was decided that the event was over and we headed upstairs to check out the damage.

This is the only real damage the house received.

Calf huts were scattered hither and yon along with other bits and pieces.

This door is supposed to be hanging up covering that opening you see in the background.

A calf shed used to be here but is completely gone.

So was it a tornado? It seems likely since they were in the area.  I don’t thing a determination will ever officially happen.  Next however is the fun of clean up.

We have 50 calf huts and they all have to been hauled home.  I believe 1 or 2 are still missing.  One was retrieved from 1.5 miles away.

The window had been boarded up.  This makes my kitchen seem very dark.

Getting the doors out of the way under the watchful eye of Brownie the dog.

All in all it has been quite the adventure.

Creativity

Malissa suffers from that Thornton syndrome of being unable to do nothing.  She absolutely must be up to something or else she is sleeping.  There is no in between.
She expresses this by being very creative.  She’s always making something.  These are a couple of the projects she made in the last few weeks.
Finger Knitting

Malissa saw the other 4th grade class up to this and decided she had to figure it out so we looked it up online.  By the end of the day, she was turning out quite the impressive piece.
Volcano

She made a volcano previously in school but we still looked up instructions.

Once the cinder cone was made it was on to the ingredients which I conveniently had in the kitchen.

Success! The picture looks more yellow but our lava actually looked orange.
This was also a project of Malissa’s.  Her teacher had made some pom-poms out of tissue paper so Malissa tried her hand at it.  She made one giant pom-pom and it turns out it was a great decoration for her party.

We’ve been trying to decide…a bird?…a butterfly…its pretty fun anyway!