Penelope the brave has unfortunately lost her courage, so I am currently singing loudly so my song can accompany her in the bathroom. Sigh.
She also calls pennies "my twenty dollars!" and gets super excited.
Here's a little photo journey to capture our last month!
Havala got a homemade guitar from a Classical Conversations gift exchange with Pringles and sock in it. She loves her CC group--the friendship and the learning challenges--and is thriving. She is hoping to do concurrent enrollment next year with OU near us for her junior year.
Kel and Reka and family joined us in our family Polar Bear plunge in Hungary...and helped keep each other warm, oooh la la!
(A little photo of our granddaughter ringing in the new year with her darling daddy!)
Our version of the Polar Bear Plunge! With Spooner as our special commentator ;).
A fun quick visit from our relatives from the north! The boys talked the adults into going into the woods for a "hunt each other down" adventure. Only one shoe was lost in the skirmish and quickly recovered.
Christmas was fun! If you check out this awesome shirt from yours truly to my honey, you'll see all members of the family represented.
This man always rocks the holidays with style!
Now we know where the kids get it from... here's Zsa-man posing by the most cool advent calendar ever, from our beloved G-ma.
We love having two of our sistas home for the holidays! Pipalicious from Idaho and Tovacula (posing as a much taller person in this photo) from northern Ohio, her beloved-to-us new home. Pipaliciuos is doing well--school is a little too easy for her so she's looking into transferring, but she's enjoying the social scene and adulting.
Spooner loves his new robe and cool Percy Jackson necklace that he received from The Goob in our sibling gift exchange.
Here Papaya is trying to find one of her presents in her treasure hunt--a Buchanan father tradition that Quinn has picked up (and this year he recruited some older sibs to help which was a wise move on his part, with 10 hunts to go!). Can you see the photo bomber in this picture?
Pre-Christmas, the creativity never stops with dry erase markers. This way we capture the art without taking up room!
We had a great couple nights with Tova after her cool community choir December concert. It was pretty amazing! So much musicianship. Tova loves music, got a piano for Christmas, rounding out her home musical instruments to now have a guitar, ukelele, violin, organ, electric piano and now piano. She is working on a Masters in Play Therapy and hopes to be able to incorporate music into it. Ben is surviving his current job in Ohio--doing well, and enjoying with Tova their first home, along with their two dogs, Zoey and Zane. (You can check out some short videos of her concert at the end.)
Cleaning out the barn and winterizing the garden....double shazaam. We love riding wherever when going back and forth between Opama's (as we lovingly call our parent's property) and ours.
Liesl is growing up so so fast! She loves to read, does her math well, and has a killer smile with her missing teeth too. (She just lost another a couple nights ago.) We have a tradition of doing a tooth fairy dance--led by Daddy--to really get the tooth fairy's attention and she only had to do it twice this time to get the tooth fairy to come. She loves playing the piano and singing, too, which is such a blessing! She is super nervous at night which can be hard on her mommy who is not a night person. Thankfully, Daddy is also helping there too, although there are still nights when I will lay down near them until their nervous little minds fall asleep, sometimes after 10 pm (two hours after laying down!!). Like I said, hard...but she's cute!
Speaking of cute, here Ple-ple aka Lopey aka Pe-lope-lope-ee (as she calls herself) is wearing a darling outfit a friend found amidst her Christmas decorations. It was what her 17 year old daughter wore at Penelope's size and is SO adorable! She does love dress up, even if she can't stand having anything in her hair.
We've had a few snowy scenes to enjoy this winter so far and Maia Papaya captured one of them here.
Papaya has been enjoying her Vanguard group this semester. We do one day of heavier classes: world history, biology with labs, consumer math and an ongoing community project, involving swords, jiu-jitiszu and strategy. So fun!
Here is her viking ship that she made out of popsicle sticks and toothpicks.
Eli had fun joining in the group. He's always quick with a joke and a laugh, especially when older kids are around, although he also delights in making his little sisters laugh, too. He has been valiantly--if painstakingly--taking on his dyslexia challenges and making a lot of headway, even if he doesn't see it. Forunately, his brain is like a sponge, so he can memorize to help compensate.
Here is their boat...before we put it onto our swimming pool and lighted them with matches to see which one would last the longest.
We also made gingerbread houses this year, as a family with a St. Mikulas present and as a Vanguard group with a whole kitchen full of 16-some odd gingerbread houses!
Here's our "baby Jesus" from the Christmas pageant that escaped relatively unscathed.
Liesl's Christmas art!
Penelope sporting some more winter wear...
Apparently she learned from the last "winter wear" experiment!
Maia with her first parking job! Nice. She's excited to drive. And grow up in general, sigh. Darling girl. Her learning has really exploded this semester, but I'm so grateful that she makes time for her art, still. She has an eye for art and blesses us all with both that and her gentle feistiness. <3
Here we have the two littles after their combined project of making mac n' cheese together. So fun!
Tova's concert!
But really, this is so much for me, but you can enjoy if you'd like!
This weekend we made time to go and get our Christmas tree. We opt for the real trees each year--a particular favorite of Quinn's and they are beautiful. Here is a picture of Liesl studiously cutting off the blue netting.
Here is Drew trying not to look creepy and failing. "I'm just smiling and being supportive." Ah-huh.
Liesl even changed her clothes so that she could replicate her outfit from last year. We spent a while getting out all the ornaments. Maia and Lily did an amazing job with the garland around the edges of the room and the stairs and one of the beams. They even got the lighting to work out! Drew and Eli finished up with the other beams, as we all reminisced about our glorious days of ignorance when we, well, the kids, would walk back and forth over the beams just for fun. Now, once a year they do. We even put up hammocks in our front room the first year...and then we saw the stress fractures and possibly more breaks in the wood. Well, we didn't want to take any other chances but the kids remember the beam walking with fondness.
Maia suggested putting up supports on the beams this one time of year and decorating them. Love it!
Eli and Liesl carried the tree in together and did a great job.
This year we checked out Menard's Christmas tree options and then went back to Eli's place of preference, Lowes. There is just such an open spirit of fun and a much better selection! (Now I just need a discount at Lowe's for that shameless plug, lol.)
We had a feisty selection process to get our tree. Lily's tree won despite my shameless strategy of naming my tree "Penelope's Tree." (She ended up voting for Lily's as well.)
As a missionary at church brought up when referencing the mood at our Turkey Bowl, "they'll take you down with a gleam of glory in their eyes, but then help you up quickly with geniune inquiries after your well-being." Oh, yeah. We're a fun bunch!
The selection video:
And speaking of Turkey Bowl, here's a video of the survivors...those who made it to the bitter end.
...front...
...and back.
On Black Friday, we drove a ways to meet up with Tova and hit up some stores in the middle. We were also able to treat Elder Flowers to brunch, and we ordered 14 sandwiches from Tim Horton's. Apparently, ordering that many sandwiches is a problem on Black Friday. It took about 25 minutes to get them, although I am pretty sure I saw them making sandwiches for any other order that came through during the process so that some of them were a little on the cool side. Harumph.
Eli and Penelope were troopers waiting on the side:
We've had a few snowy scenes to enjoy this winter so far and Maia Papaya captured one of them here.
Eli had fun joining in the group. He's always quick with a joke and a laugh, especially when older kids are around, although he also delights in making his little sisters laugh, too. He has been valiantly--if painstakingly--taking on his dyslexia challenges and making a lot of headway, even if he doesn't see it. Forunately, his brain is like a sponge, so he can memorize to help compensate.
Here is their boat...before we put it onto our swimming pool and lighted them with matches to see which one would last the longest.
We also made gingerbread houses this year, as a family with a St. Mikulas present and as a Vanguard group with a whole kitchen full of 16-some odd gingerbread houses!
Here's our "baby Jesus" from the Christmas pageant that escaped relatively unscathed.
Liesl's Christmas art!
Penelope sporting some more winter wear...
