Christmas excitement

Clair is beyond herself excited for Christmas this year. 

She has spent significant time buying and making and wrapping presents. She was so excited to make cookies. She keeps asking when we will make fudge. 

She has taken to some sudden squealing of excitement throughout the day about how she can’t wait for Christmas and is so excited! 

She has a lot of excitement for buying presents for others now. 

Christmas readiness has come early this year

This is actually from December 2022 but was missed last year. 

Clair started asking about the Christmas tree in October. The girl has plans. She wanted the tree up the day after Thanksgiving. My rule is that it has to be December. Well, she won! 

At nine she is full of energy and joy and love for the world. She is so excited for Christmas and the magic. She believes and loves with her full heart. This makes it magical for us both and I decided to try to indulge as much as I could with her this year from the early tree decorating, to all the traditions she remember, to the early arrival of the Elf, to shopping for siblings, to decorating, cookies, fudge, countdown chains, oh my!  

The finished tree and elves   

The cherry pie tradition after tree decorating continues. 


Walking in the Christmas Parade with Girl Scouts and enjoying giving out candy from her Santa sack. 

After the parade. 

Small crew this year waiting for Santa. 

Santa gave her a present. 

She won the guess for one of the candies and Aliza won the other one. 

Visiting Santa with Gramma and her cousins 

We even ordered matching PJs which I’ve never done with her!

Broken bones

We’ve been lucky not to experience this through almost 16 years of parenting until this past week. 

Poor Clair - broken ulna and radius - as a result of dare devil moves and video dreams occurring in the basement whilst I was in DC for work. It was a very unpleasant call to receive and I nearly left. But I stayed because I need to network and it was very interesting. 

Daddy and Gramma took care of her. The hardest part was resetting the bones. She tells me it felt like the Cruciotus curse from Harry Potter. 😳

For a week she had just a brace on it but now we have this monstrosity of a hard cast that’s so heavy and itchy! She has to have this for 12 days. Poor girl is miserable. And there’s nothing I can do to help her. I feel so sorry for her. I’ve never sat her in front of so much TV, computers and devices. It’s horrible. I’ll do anything to make the days easier to pass. She hasn’t been back to school yet but we are going to have to give it a try. 

She’s a trooper most of the time. She’s embarrassed it happened and thinks she deserves it from making stupid choices. These are not my words. These are her very adult words. Everyone tells her that people make mistakes and she should not worry. But it is hard. 

Her basketball team did this for her. So thoughtful and really raised her spirits! 

Sweet 16

This week we celebrated Ellie turning 16. She was excited,  but not about the driving piece. I think she was excited about the presents piece of it. 

She asked for a lot of tight simple clothing and a couple baggie sweatshirts. She also got a couple nice pairs of earrings including one from us of her birth stone. Grannie sent her a cool keyboard she is enjoying at her desk. 

I think she wants to have a couple friends over for a sleepover next weekend. She’s not very good at planning things. 

To celebrate the day we sent her off to school with donuts to share. The family decorations greeted her on the morning. After school she enjoyed opening her presents. She asked for goat cheese salad for dinner, so k made salads. Then we had the Latimers and Gramma over to hang out a bit and enjoy her ice cream cake with her. She enjoyed their gifts and visit a lot. 

There wasn’t much emotion or sensitive talk. She wasn’t in to pictures with us. She is 16. 

As she leaves the crazy 15 I see she’s more settled into high school with friends she enjoys, good grades, a mostly responsible outlook on life, and some level headed thoughts now and again. She’s still enjoying Jiujitsu as her sport and listening to music instead of playing it. She’s really enjoying Young Life events and relationships which I’m happy about. 

My prayer for her is to allow God to lead her today and always. 

Happy birthday to my first born! I love you!

I seriously doubt I’ll miss this

Max has a horrendous habit of never picking up after himself, especially at the kitchen table. After relaxing evening sitting here, drinking some wine and watching TV, I looked back to see this. David chuckles and tells me that in 20 years time I’ll look back and missed us and I should captured as a photo. 

So here it is, will I miss this mess everywhere?

Clair and softball

This fall I got the pleasure of coaching Clair in softball for the first time. I really enjoyed the team. I have two very helpful assistants. Tonight was our last practice. I love practicing at Libertytown, under the lights, in the fall. This park olds, many great memories, and each softball season. I’m coaching is one of them.

Clair worked hard this year. She tried a little bit of pitching. She’s been working hard in the field. She’s been trying to get better at her hitting. Clair still loves every sport and it’s hard for her to pick one to focus on. I think my girl just really likes being busy. This year she enjoyed having her friend Olivia on the team with her. It was Olivia’s first time playing sports and she really worked hard at it. I’m proud of her. I’m proud of all the girls. Most of them you could see them really working hard this season. 

here are a couple pictures of Clair hitting tonight. I really didn’t get many pictures of her the season. I only decided to take the pictures tonight because I managed to dress her like the perfect Hokie! Love it! And her!

A beautiful fall family day

Today, the kids are off school and I took the day off work, and David took the day off work. We decided to go enjoy Gavers Farm as a family. Everybody was looking forward to it, and that was the best part.

We’ve been taking the kids here ever since they were little. I don’t think any of them remember a year not going. It’s full of for fun. And, there are the most amazing views. So I absolutely love taking pictures there.

I was worried when I said we were gonna go as a family that I would hear moaning from Ellie, which would then me and Max would moon too. But she didn’t. She said she was excited. When we were leaving Max even thanked me for going, and they all said they had fun.

We have a standard way that we approach the farm, and everybody has things they enjoy and things they love. Some of our favorites are the various slides, throwing the wiffleball’s at the top of the hill, the music station, the water, ducks, and the ring toss game.

Lots of fun was had by all and I made everybody pose for more pictures and they wanted to.