Well, we are getting a bit of snow, and it is supposed to get down to -7 tonight. Since we had extra kids here sleeping over, we have to take them home. Then we are going to share New Year’s Eve with friends, so we could possibly get snowed out instead of snowed in. But, hey, at least we will be having fun with friends, right?
Hope you are enjoying the weather wherever you are, “weather” it be hot or cold. 😀
Tonight we had our family Christmas time and then we got to spend the rest of the day with two other families from church. We don’t seem to get the opportunity to get together often just to enjoy each other’s company, so today was a big treat! We ate finger foods, played board games, and joked with each other! Thanks to the Reynolds’ family for having us over and being very hospitable.
I have to tell you that playing board games is one of my favorite things to do with a group. If someone pulls out a board game, it is hard for me to say “no.” I am a fun-aholic and actually have a difficult time stopping once I have started. Anyone else have that problem? What is your favorite thing to do with a group?
Several weeks ago, a friend of ours let us borrow a Christmas tree that they would not be using. Since we have a family tradition of spending Friday evenings together as a family, we decided to spend the next Friday decorating for Christmas.
We were very pleased that our friend also loaned us Christmas lights, and the best part was that the lights were blue (both Luke’s and my favorite color)!!
Other than the lights, we went the old fashioned way with decorations. We strung popcorn and hung anything pretty, including jewelry on it! And we did it all to the sound of Christmas music on pandora.
We also made a paper chain counting down the days until Christmas. We cut out slips of paper and divided them between the four older kids. They each colored the same amount of links, and we put them on the chain so that the kids got to take turns taking off the links they created themselves! I think they had a blast!! I know I did!
After making the chain and decorating the tree, we sat on the couch with popcorn and watched The Grinch while staring at our newly decorated borrowed Christmas tree.
What type of decorations do you have up at your house this year? Are there certain traditions that you follow each year?
A friend shared a song with me on Sunday that was very good, but I will probably never be able to sing it. Yet I seem to sing it daily…at least parts of it. I will sing other parts of it when my children are a bit older. 🙂
I discovered that The Mom Song was actually written by Anita Renfroe, whom I will be posting more about later. For now, let’s watch it sung by someone else. I am posting this particular version because it has the words to help you attempt to keep up with the speed of the song. 🙂
The Mom Song from Northland Video on Vimeo.
We are having family night a day early this week because Luke was sick and thought a movie sounded good. Since we had already gotten library movies for Family Night, we decided it was a go. 🙂
We started out with a Christmas chain to help the kids know how many days until Christmas without asking Mom or Dad. They can just pick up the chain and count the days.
This is the first year Bethany got to help with the chain. She actually colored little designs instead of scribbling all over the links like I expected. I was quite impressed with the personality and artistic ability that each child’s work showed!
Now that I have taken this break to get my daily blog post taken care of, we are off to put the two little ones to bed and watch Eragon and eat rice krispy balls with the older three!
We discovered a little over a month ago that our current van has transmission trouble. We immediately started shopping on craigslist for a replacement vehicle, hoping to prevent being stranded without a vehicle. The fact that our inspection sticker on our current van expires in December and can’t be renewed with a bad transmission also helped motivate us in our search.
Because we max out a mini-van, we decided to go with something a little bigger. So, I have now been searching a little over a month for a 12 passenger van. What I found is a 12 passenger if you count the wheelchair it is equipped for. Otherwise, it is an 11 passenger. I’m not sure, but I think this one will be big enough! 😉
We call it “The Bus.” What do you think?
Thanksgiving 2008 can be marked as the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever had away from my extended family. We were invited to spend Thanksgiving with some friends of ours, and it worked out really well because neither of our families have extended family living nearby. The Kowalczyk’s informed us that, for that day, we were considered part of the family! And boy was being a Kowalczyk fun!
We showed up at their house at around 10 am and jumped right into cooking Thanksgiving dinner. After eating a delicious dinner in which everything tasted so good we weren’t sure what to call our favorite, we spent all day playing games and talking. We played Scrabble, Air Hockey, Rummy-O, and some old Nintendo games! It felt like we had stepped back a decade, and we were young again!
We had so much fun! I know Thanksgiving is all about family, but I learned this Thanksgiving that it is also about friends! And what better celebration of Thanksgiving is there, in the absence of family, than to spend it with friends that love you just the way you are! We feel blessed to be friends with the Kowalczyk’s! I hope they enjoyed themselves as much as we did! God Bless you, Brett and Jessi!
Daddy!
Today I received an email from the parentalrights.org blog about an issue that I had just barely been introduced to in the past. I was introduced to a threat to all parents across America that got my full attention and caused me to be afraid in a way that I have never feared in my life. This fear is caused by the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. Please read the article. Please. Here is an excerpt.
Since its adoption by the United Nations in 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has become the most widely accepted international agreement in history, ratified by every nation of the world except for the United States and Somalia. All signatories pledge to protect children’s rights, foster their development, and uphold their best interests by re-writing their national laws to conform to the standards set forth in the treaty.
While all this may sound harmless and even commendable, the reality is that the Convention allows and even demands that national governments interfere in the decisions of individual families and parents. By invoking the “best interests of the child ,” policymakers and government agents have the authority to substitute their own decisions for those of the child or parent. In short, parents lose their rights to be parents, and become merely caregivers. The result, as parents across the globe are now discovering, is that the family is being steadily undermined, often with tragic and devastating results for the very children who are supposed to be protected.
Without research and/or understanding of what “The Rights of the Child” refers to, the idea sounds like a great one. Everyone wants their children to have rights. Unfortunately the idea that the United Nations is pushing allows parents to take care of the physical needs of their children but takes away any other influence that the parents may have on their children. The children are expected to learn what the UN approves of and nothing else (including morals)!
Parentalrights.org is taking it upon themselves to keep track of countries who have already accepted this proposal of the United Nations and post about it every 2 weeks. Please go to their site regularly or put their posts in your RSS feed. Also, go to the site of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights site and read the declaration for the Convention for the Rights of the Child. The second statement in Article 2 was most disturbing to me. It states that
States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that the child is protected against all forms of discrimination or punishment on the basis of the status, activities, expressed opinions, or beliefs of the child’s parents, legal guardians, or family members.
Read that again and think about it. Think hard about it. It says that parents have no influence on the thoughts, activities, opinions or beliefs of their children. Is that what you want for your children? It most definitely is not what I want for mine. According to “Imagine If…” by parental rights.org, the Unites States is only one of two countries that have not accepted this. If you disagree with the things written in “the Rights of the children” please do yourself and everyone around you a favor and do everything you can to discourage America’s agreement to it. You might want to start by signing a petition showing that you are against the interference of government on your right to parent your children. Then you might want to consider getting down on your knees and having a long talk with the Person most able to prevent this intrusion on our parental rights.
Update (1/3/09): I now know that this convention was signed by president Clinton but was stopped by congress. Now president Obama is planning to get it passed. This is very urgent! Go here to do all you can to help.
Note: Although it was not my original intent when writing this post and it is a bit late, this post has a lot to do with the government. If Robert Hruzek at Middle Zone Musings is willing, please consider this my submission for this month’s “What I Learned From” project.
Today I will show you pictures of the newspaper strips, wetting the strips with a paste of flour & water, and putting the strips on the balloon. The kids seemed to have a blast with every step of the pinata-making, but it was most obvious with the newspaper strips!
If you missed Making Pinatas Part 1, feel free to take a moment to catch up.
