Merry Christmas!

We've had a wonderful Christmas Day!  

For some unknown reason our two youngest children woke us up at 5:30 am.  We've always told them they can get us up after 7 am and they usually can wait later than 6 or 6:30.  But I guess it was too much this year.  So we sent them to eat breakfast and slowly got up around 6 to see what Santa brought us this year.

Christmas morning....

As usual we headed over to my parents home for the Christmas Day brunch.  My dad makes omelets every year for family and neighbors.  They are big and filling omelets, full of whatever you want!  So we spent our afternoon eating and visiting and then bringing cousins back to play with us.  Tricia and Justin came to pick up Grayce and the snow came with them and it hasn't stopped yet.  It truly is a white Christmas this year.  Grant will have his work cut out for him tomorrow, lots of shoveling!

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

A Letter

I'm so excited to share this.  Another child at the same orphanage as our children asked Anna (helps the children with writing letters to pen pals) to help him send a letter to the family he stayed with in October.  So I emailed Anna to see if she would help us get in touch with Marina, Ivan and Anya and this came in her email!

And I do have a small surprise for now :)
Ivan gave me a letter. Kids always give me a whole bunch of letters
when I'm there. And some time ago, when I sat down to translate, I saw
that he wrote to "family Keller, house number 96" :)
At that time I knew nothing about you, and this family wasn't in touch
with him thru my project for pen paling. So, I marked the letter "I
need to talk to Ivan and ask what is that family, because I don't have
their address in my database". :)
I went back thru the letters and I found it :)
So, here it is!

Hello Mother and Father!
It's your children writing to you from Ukraine.
We miss you so much, and we want already to be with you. We missed
Inton, Morgan and Gwen //(I have no idea if I'm spelling the names
right, sorry! Anya)//
We would like those 6-7 months to fly buy very fast! We would like you
to take us there forever! Mom and dad, maybe you could also invite my
best friend, Ivan? He is such a nice boy and I love him. I think you
will like him a lot, too. I don't know if it's ok to ask about this,
though.
How's Persi? We miss him.
How's everyone? We miss you so much. We hope this letter gets to you.
We will end it here!
with lots of love, Anya, Marina and Ivan!
good-bye!

Now I am sure that Keller family, house number 96 is you ;)

I was so excited and happy I just had to share!  Merry Christmas (to me)!

Morgan as Annie

Morgan's acting class (with the 3 other 3rd - 6th grade acting classes) had there mid year performance.  Morgan's class did a scene from Annie and Morgan got to be Annie!  Here is her little clip.  Darling.

Thank you for the music

15 YEARS!

I got an awful sore throat, turn cold, this week and have been a little slow to post.  But..

...Yesterday was our 15th Wedding Anniversary!  Tuesday I had picked up my vases that I had made in pottery and so Troy sent me a bunch of flowers for each vase for our anniversary (I didn't realize that at the time of the picture, thus the two empty vases).  SO SWEET.  I was so impressed that he noticed I had brought home 5 vases!  

Yes the thought has gone through my head that when we adopt Marina, who will be 15 in June, anyone who can do math will think we had to go to Vegas to get married.  Maybe we should get a vegas wedding picture just for fun : )

Christmas Surprise!

Sunday, Grandma and Grandpa came over with a basket of goodies for the kids to open and eat/play with.  What a fun Christmas surprise!  They said they came to see our tree and all the presents under the tree.  

We only put up one tree this year.  The small living room tree with all of the kids ornaments (the kids ornaments are usually on the big tree in the basement).

Grants choir concert

This song was as many Christmas songs as they could sing in three minutes... can you guess how many songs they sang?  For the correct guess Grant will sing you a solo and give you a big kiss under the mistletoe!  (I'll double check on that)