Happy New Year, Friends

It's been awhile since I posted - I got sick on Christmas Eve and still have the remaining traces of the cold and cough. I hadn't been that sick in a loooooooonnnng time! Even with my garlic tea, colloidial silver, etc. etc, it was a long, drawn out thing.


So now that I feel back among the land of the living, here's a quick update on what else we have been up to.


Christmas was wonderful and low-key this year. We had a party here on the 23rd with five families in attendance, and we decided to do homemade gifts for one another. It was great to see how creative my friends were! There were homemade games, cookies, crafts... it was lovely! Then we all enjoyed lots of appetizers and played games. We can't wait to do it again next year.


We had a candlelight Christmas Eve service the next night at church, and came home to lots of wonderful leftovers from the party the night before. It was bedtime on this night that the ol' throat started hurting. We got up the next morning to a relaxed time of kids opening gifts. And then I crawled back to bed and stayed there for pretty much the rest of the day, sipping garlic tea and sleeping. I did homemade gifts for the kids... my firstborn LOVED his Steelers quilt!


We decided rather last minute to visit our good friends in the Twin Cities for New Years. A lovely time was had by all (except maybe dad, who started getting this flu thing New Year's Eve). We played games till midnight - and of course the kids loved staying awake that late.

Every year, we do this time capsule thing - we had gotten this little silver time capsule from (ugh, do I have to say it??) McDonalds back in the year 2000. Anyway, I made a list of different things on a piece of paper, such as favorite color, favorite Bible verse/story, favorite song, favorite hobby, best memory of the past year, something you'd like to learn in the new year, etc etc. Every year on New Years Eve I print out this sheet from my computer, and we sit around and give our current answers. Then we read aloud our answers from previous years (and usually have some good laughs). Finally we lock everything up in the time capsule and put it in our Christmas stuff to be taken out next year. Our little silver capsule is getting rather full; I am going to need to microfilm the sheets of paper or something!

This week has been back to the grindstone. I am starting a study on Ancient Greece with the older two kids. We finished up Ancient Egypt before Christmas. Most of the kids (and mom) listed "aloud reading" as their favorite school subject in our time capsule project. We love studying history this way, with living books!