I am so excited about celebrating the Christmas season with Dominic and Rosie. As we opened each new box of decorations that they helped bring down fromthe attic , there were ooooos and aaaaahs of excitement. We drove up towards Highlands to choose our tree and cut it down - it was appropraitely freezing, but unfortunately no snow. On Sunday, the kids rode on the firetruck in the Christmas parade and then watched the rest of the parade, delighted to pick up the candy thrown their way.

Thanksgiving 2010

We had our smallest Thanksgiving celebration ever . We all missed having Camila, Ryan and Julia ,and the Hare family with us. And yes, I was standing on the hutch.

Operation Christmas Child

Operation Christmas Child began in 1993, the brainchild of Franklin Graham, with the simple idea of asking people to fill a shoebox with things a child might want/need and then delivering those boxes all over the world. More than 77million boxes have been delivered. We sometimes watched videos, online, of children opening those boxes and wondered where our boxes might have ended up. My friend, Cheryl, who lives in China, once got to deliver some boxes to children living in an orphanage near her. I thought that was pretty amazing, but she is an amazing person anyway, and has done even more amazing things than that (she is now in Nepal and will soon begin opening homes for girls rescued from brothels). But, now, by the most wonderful grace of God, I have two children who received one of those boxes last year! This year, Dominic and Rosie were able to go shopping and choose things to put in the box to send to a child who is in the place they were in less than a year ago. I cannot even begin to express the JOY over what God has done! PTL !

America's First People

Can you tell I found my camera cord?
Our main focus in school this year (in addition to English acquisition) is to learn a little about the USA. The kids can all say/sing the states and locate them on a map but they can't write them all yet without looking. We have talked about Indians being the first people who inhabited our country but I have had a hard time finding videos for them to watch. While we grew up on cowboys and Indians, kids of today only know pirates and princesses. (When I was little, I longed to be an Indian maiden and was most happy on those very rare occasions when I could persuade my mother to put my hair in braids instead of my regular curls. My costume was a pillowcase with Indian designs written with lipstick. I had a good mom.)
The kids and I had a great time visiting a nearby Cherokee village and learning how they lived. We followed up with a visit to the surrounding tourist traps to buy some of the fun things that no real Cherokee ever saw. Last night we watched Davy Crockett. That probably wasn't exactly historically correct either , but I am just trying to give general impressions here. Dominic spent the first day Andy got his coonskin cap telling him he looked like a girl (with a pony tail?).
Next week we will focus on Thanksgiving. Dominic is building a paper model of the Mayflower. It is hard for me to get my mind around the idea that D and R don't have any better picture in their mind of what a European puritan/pilgrim is like than they did the Indians. (Try explaining about Columbus 'discovering America' 200 years ago to someone whose country has Recorded history for thousands of years.)

Everything continues to go amazingly well. We are so blessed.