Christmas Cookies !

By Laura

Cookies, cookies, cookies and a little icing! Yummy! Every year we make lots of cookies to give to friends, neighbors, and teachers. Mom makes most of them but we the kids love to help her. So here are a few pictures! Try not to drool on your keyboards. ;-)

Date pinwheels

Cinnamon Stars

Raspberry Ribbons

And at the end of all the baking this is what the plates look like.

Things I missed while in Ukraine

(Laura looked through my rough drafts and was disappointed I never published this blog post. I don't know why it never was "published." So, to please Laura, and even though this is very outdated, I will post something I wrote in June 2013 just after we adopted.)

We had a great time in Ukraine. We really did. But we wanted to be home... And so, to keep a positive attitude, I tried to find things to be thankful for. It was pretty easy really.

Things we were thankful for (in no particular order) :
Good health! (I was walking around with a kidney stone, and it only reminded me it was there a couple of days out of a whole month!)
A shower with good water pressure (especially when it got hot)
Wonderful weather (vacation type weather!)
A store right near the church that sold COLD Pepsi
80 cent hamburgers and 40 cent ice cream cones at MacDonald's
Two concierges that made us feel welcome
Friends that took good care of us
Wireless internet (we really didn't expect to have this)
God's hand in the details, and in the big things!

Things I am thankful to have at home (and I hope to never take them for granted again) :
A washing machine
A clean towel whenever I want
A frig, a stove, a kitchen sink, well ok, the whole kitchen!!!
Drinkable tap water
Peace and quiet (the only thing that wakes us up is birds singing)
A double bed
A yard
A houseful of activities to keep kids busy
Camembert (I added this one for Philip. I didn't really miss it)

Nathan in the News

Nathan has been in the news a couple of times in 2014. The first time because he was one of the top students in his Aviation Skills class. (This class does not involve actual flying.)
And more recently because he is participating in the Science Olympics for high schoolers. He has passed the first selection (written test) and this week will have a lab exam.
Here is a link for those of you that read French or just want to look at the pictures. Not sure how long the link will remain active.
Here is the news article.

Ants, ants, ants

This Summer. One of the little boys found an ant hill with eggs etc. He wanted to know more about ants. We found a good book with lots of pictures that I have, and they begged me to read it. Now, it was vacation, and I wasn't really up for too much reading... so after a few pages, I tried to put the book down, but the four youngest (our 12 year old reads just fine on his own) BEGGED me to finish the book. So I did. Then we went online to look for an ant farm. Too expensive. Then we went on Wikihow and made our own ant farm. That jar was the center of attention for many days! (I wish I could say that this is how I teach all the time, but mostly I am just caught up in getting things done, and I don't follow their lead enough. So don't think I am like this all the time! I guess since it was still summer vacation, I felt a little freer…)

Late Flowers

(I had really hoped to get back to blogging, but as you can easily see, I am not really succeeding. So as so many popular blogs do, I am inviting a new author to help me out! Laura has asked to write posts for me, and that sounded like a great idea to me! So here is her first post. Perfectly picked, as she is our flower lover. She has been planting flowers in the vegetable garden since she could walk. Her brothers think this is a BIG waste of spaded dirt.)


We still had FLOWERS in November! It didn't frost until mid December here.
So most of the flowers that we had planted for the wedding were still looking pretty.
So here are a few of my favorite pictures of our autumn and almost winter flowers.

 Marguerite

 Dahlias

I think this was a Dahlia that the soccer brothers knocked off its stem.

 Cosmos

 

Rose

 Black-eyed Susans (that is what the French call them)

 Hypericum

 The forsythia decided to flower again in the fall. 

Sunflowers

 

The flower bed.

I hope you all enjoyed my very first post!