November 30 – Colleyville Christmas Tree Lighting

December 8 – Ward Christmas breakfast.

(It took a lot of bribery to get those kids to dress up like that!)

December 20 – opening a couple presents before we drove to Utah. The gifts included a new portable DVD player, headphones, and a bunch of DVDs — all things they could use on the drive!

December 22 – driving to Utah. We needed gas desperately somewhere in the middle of New Mexico and the only place to stop was this little, old gas station along Route 66. DJ literally went inside and asked if the pumps work because he hadn’t seen such old pumps since he was a kid! They sure worked, rotary dials and all! You just pump your gas, then go in and pay.

December 23 – family Christmas “Eve” party. For some reason, the only photos I have from that gathering are blurry.

Carter and Bryce opening presents.

December 24 – it snowed on Christmas Eve so Raine, Carter, Bella, and Tessa played in it.

These kids spent a lot of hours playing Shut the Box and Payday.

Opening Christmas pajamas.

Decorating cookies.

Leaving oats for Santa’s reindeer.

Leaving cookies for Santa.

Raine started playing the viola this year in the district orchestra. They meet two days a week, after school, at one of the other elementary schools in the district. Tuesday night was their Christmas concert.

The first number on the video is all 3 orchestras (beginner, intermediate, and advanced). The second number is the beginner orchestra plucking a Christmas song. The third number is the beginner orchestra doing the night before Christmas where Raine is one of the narrators. We were behind her and it is almost impossible to hear her on the recording.

Raine took 3rd place in the school spelling bee this year!

Below is a video with each of her words (axis, Japanese, buzzard, martyr, sagacity, juniper, frippery, tomfoolery). You can hear how the pronunciation on the last word was incorrect, and Raine spelled it as it was pronounced, so she was a little upset about that. Regardless, she did great and I’m glad that she didn’t place any higher or else we would have had to worry about the district spelling bee!

This was our celebration that evening.

We celebrated Carter’s mastery of the letter R as well. Last year I started the process for him to receive speech therapy services at school and it took the entire school year to make it through the process. Right before school let out for the summer, Carter had one session with the speech pathologist. She showed him how to form the R sound and it made sense to him. He spent the entire summer working on making the R sound every time he spoke. When he went back to school this fall and had his first speech therapy session, he had mastered his R in all situations. His therapist was floored! It took another 3 months to get his speech services terminated so we celebrated him finishing speech as well.