Christmas

Signe received her much asked-for bread maker and a new robe, and we feasted this evening at the Sentz house.

Underwear for Christmas? Boooo!

Idaho cousins on Christmas Eve.

It’s getting colder...

... 2 days before Christmas. -3 degrees F.

GI Joe revisited...

Mom and Dad got this GI Joe toy attack boat for Christmas in the mid-80s. Now my youngest son Karsten is playing with it, Christmas 2017. Mom and Dad, I think you got your money's worth out of this one.

11 degrees F as the sun came up. Looks like we’ll have a white Christmas with what we got yesterday. Snow is forecast for Christmas Day too.

New wood stove makes the downstairs much more comfortable.

Gingerbread houses

Our friends the Doanes hosted several families over this afternoon for a gingerbread house decorating contest (with a lot of candy snacking as well). Zane missed most of the decorating because he had his first ever orthodontic appointment - braces are in his immediate future!

Charlie Brown’s Christmas

Karsten has his first play ever today, the last day before Christmas break. He was a narrator in the same play that his teacher Mrs. Sawyer did with Gunnar's kindergarten class.

Christmas house in the December fog.

Thanksgiving 2017

Oops! We forgot to send any pictures of the absolutely lovely week we spent feasting, playing games, napping, and celebrating Thanksgiving with all the grandparents in Oregon last month.

Christmas concert

Sadly Karsten came down with a mild case of pink eye and an occasional low fever the past couple of days, so he stayed home with Signe tonight. He missed looking ridiculously cute singing with all the other kindergartners in the Logos concert.
Gunnar is pictured with his 5th grade classmates Jesiah Brower, Bo Whitling, Tiernan Nuttbrock, cousin Ransom, and Noah Atwood. (And now he wants a blazer for Christmas so he can look as stylin' as the first three). Zane is with 2nd grade classmates Kyle McMurray and Benton Brown - ironically the only other boys that were in his small preschool class. This year there are 15 boys and only 5 girls (and Zane loves having so many buddies to play with!). The last pic is the 4th and 5th graders' turn on the stage. There were a lot of kids who sang tonight!

Advent snowflakes

On Saturday we cut two trees for both upstairs and downstairs, and after some work with the loppers they look pretty good (for ungroomed trees)! Today I enjoyed a luncheon with some friends to celebrate Bonnie's 39th birthday, and now it is wonderful to be gone with a cozy fire. The kid's advent activity is to help create more wintery decor for the windows.

Sunday afternoon...

... Abby snoozes with the dog, while Signe makes bread.

Winter ball

Karsten and Signe get all dressed up for the dance (Zane is somewhere too), and Signe is excited to attend her first secondary ball. Karsten is dancing with kindergarten classmate Elaina Blakey.
Gunnar had to choose between going to the ball or basketball practice. It wasn't much of a contest.

Signe’s artwork

She really enjoys her art classes at school, and these are 2 she did in 6th grade that Signe just brought home. Signe said she especially spent a lot of time working on the moon.

Snow *sigh*

They need to go to bed soon, but my kids are having fun scraping snow off the deck and attempting snowball fights. While I know a November 3rd snowfall isn't all that unusual (according to locals), in our 9 years
in Moscow it beats our previously earliest snowfall by a few weeks. It is supposed to be another rough winter... and I'm not sure I ever completely recovered from the last one!

Halloween oops!

In our rush to get out the door we didn't get our annual pic this year. At the harvest festival Signe got 2nd place in her age category as chewed-up gum (she dressed all in stuffed pink with pink face paint, with a shoe tied to the top of her head). Karsten got 3rd place as Darth Vader, which was a repeat of Zane's costume last year. Darth Vader is common enough, but I think Karsten got bonus points for posing with Darth's choke hold. Zane was a ninja, and Gunnar merely reprised his Greek Perseus toga due to a lack of planning ahead.

Spokane speech meet

Nick volunteered yesterday to drive up several boys to the inner-school speech meet, which involved 5 schools and hundreds of participants. Zane and Gunnar both did awesome and earned blue ribbons

Speech meet time of year

Last Friday Zane and Gunnar both earned high enough scores on their speeches to be among the 3 kids from their class to move on to the inter school speech meet in Spokane next week. Zane recited Proverbs 6:16-23, and Gunnar did Lou Gehrig's 1939 farewell address in Yankee Stadium. The boys also got blue ribbons for all A's first quarter.
Signe had her first secondary speech meet today, which involved about eighty 7th-9th graders. She delivered part of Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 "Man in the Arena" speech with such conviction that she was the only candidate chosen from the Historical Oration Category to perform it again in front of all the secondary students later in the day. It's quite special to be among only 7 kids chosen to recite their piece again, and she was pretty nervous as a petite 7th grader (the audience chuckled when they had to adjust the microphone down to her level) to stand in front of the big 12 graders. But she pulled it off great.

The Adventures of Perseus

Gunnar played the lead character of Perseus this morning in his 5th grade play under teacher Miss Clemans. Perseus went on a journey to cut off Medusa's head.