Christmas 2009 part 1

Our Christmas season started this year with another Journey to Bethlehem. This is a Christmas celebration put on by our church where the community is invited in to come and experience Bethlehem as it may have been at the time that Jesus was born. There are market place vendors selling cheese, baskets, candles and spices. In addition there is a Hebrew School. This year the boys again played the part of Hebrew children in the school learning about the coming Messiah. By the end of the school day they were able to recite a few Hebrew Words and tell the visitors to Bethlehem of the birth of the baby.
After traveling through the city visitors are invited to have a bowl of lentil soup and some bread and visit with the baby all the townspeople have been talking about. It is a wonderful event to get our hearts and minds focused on the meaning of our Christmas celebrations.

Where does the time go...

All right... I am giving up. I have this goal to get caught up and I keep getting further behind. Can you forgive me for fast forwarding through the months of October and November in an effort to post the more recent fun activities of our family.

Here is a brief look at a few pictures from the past couple of months in no particular order...

A visit to a water park over the Thanksgiving holiday. One of the perks of being a home school family is being able to visit places like this during their non-peak times and therefore saving a lot while making fun memories!
Of course this fall there were leaf piles to jump into!
A lot of our homeschooling time this fall has been spent discussing the early settlers to our nation and how they lived. We just completed a unit on the Revolutionary War and the birth of a nation. One of the many colonial day experiences we have had was making our own butter... The second picture is the kids eating it!

Several of our friends have had babies over the past few months and our boys have enjoyed holding the new little ones... Below is JJ with Hannah and Seth with Josias...


We also had the opportunity to attend a Newsboys concert in October... We met up with a couple of friends from church to enjoy the show!

And finally there were many fall festivals. Here we are spending an afternoon on the farm with our neighbor Max.
Thanks for allowing me this fast forward...

Happy Thanksgiving...

Our Thanksgiving break included a trip up north to Wisconsin. While Daddy hunted with Grandpa Breeden, Uncle Jeff and Uncle Jim; Michelle hung out with the boys at Grandma's house.

We enjoyed our time visiting and thank Aunt Jess, Carter and Ali and Aunt Amy, Samuel, Isaac and Grace for coming to visit with us as well.

There were games with Grandma...Decorating Turkey cookies in preparation for Thanksgiving Day.



Pack Attack with Ron Davis (former #60, now the Packer Player Management guy).

Bell Ringing with the Salvation Army...
And just enjoying the time with family...

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

One of the many joys of the holidays for me is all the decorations. We decided to get ours out before we left for Thanksgiving. Here are the boys setting up their tree...




And the finished product...
Pictures of the family tree to come later...

No more Training wheels...

As often happens in a house where there are four boys running around the youngest learns to do things a little bit sooner than others. This is, of course, because by this time their parents have learned all the tricks...

Don't believe me...

OK, it is because they have big brothers to look up to...

Probably a little more likely...

However, in the case of Seth and his training wheels there may be another explanation... It started early this summer... Seth would be out riding his bike and it would fall over. We would help him up and the same thing would happen. After a couple of times of falling, we would have to bend the training wheel back in place... It seems that after years of being used (these training wheels have been passed down from one bike to another) they had gotten a little weaker.... As the summer progressed we would be out taking a bike ride and the training wheels would bend or slip off of the support and over Seth would fall. As we began to inspect the training wheels further we realized how worn out they really were.

The options came down to... Get new training wheels or teach Seth to ride without them. So we took them off and off he went. It appears that he had been learning through his many falls, not to rely on the training too much anyway. I actually think the presence of training wheels was causing him to fall more because once they were off he stopped falling. Now he is zooming around with his brothers. We still have to help him get the bike started but he is able to steer, ride and stop along with us.

Johnny Appleseed Festival

When you come to the city of Fort Wayne, you can find the gravesite of the legendary Johnny Appleseed. Each year the city of Fort Wayne holds the Johnny Appleseed Festival, a trip back in time that celebrates colonial life in Indiana.

There are games for the kids...

And shows that explain life during the colonial times. The boys and I are watching a lady with a Possum in this picture.


One of the highlights for the boys was the loud, booming cannon that went off every half hour or so.

Strides of Hope Run...

This year I ran my first ever 5k. The Strides of Hope is a fund raising event for the Hope Crisis Pregnancy Center. My goal was to run the whole thing and to finish it in less than 40 minutes. I ran everything except for 2 short uphills (at the advice of my husband who said it is a waste of energy to run uphill) and finished in 36:50.


On the other side of the road are the walkers who did one lap and cheered us on as we ran!