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!