Emily's 9th Birthday party

This past Saturday was Emily's birthday party. We usually just have her grandparents over and her Auntie Marian since we can't handle any more people than that here in our little house. We tried to get a big house with a formal dining area but it was not meant to be. So even with this little group, we have to move a few things around to accommodate the extra guests. But it doesn't matter, Emily is always so excited for her grandparents to come see her.

I can't believe Emily is turning 9. It seemed like only a couple of years ago that I quit my professional job  of 8 years to become a stay at home mom. I can tell you that this job is definitely harder in a lot of ways...and seemingly less gratifying. Yes, you read that right. I will not feel that all the sacrifices, stress, frustration and heart ache was worthwhile until my girls are truly grown up and are out in the world making good decisions for themselves. That will be the most gratifying day of all. But I doubt that it will ever be that clear. You don't just wake up one day and say, "we did good." But hope springs eternal...

Emily got a couple of funny "trick" presents from Auntie Marian. She knows what trouble Emily has had with sugar lately. So she emptied a oreo cookie container and put a bunch of toothpaste, floss and toothbrushes and stuff in it. But Emily still appreciates it and had a lot of fun with it.

While we were still eating, a package arrived in the mail from her grandma in Hawaii. It was such perfect timing! Her biggest present this year though, was a digital camera from my mom. My mom won a new digital camera from some raffle and decided to give Emily her old one. It is really nice too. I kind of think my mom should have given her the new one and kept the old one personally. The new one she got is one of those fancy touch screen camera's. I tried it out and cannot navigate it. It is a pain in the butt. I'll take the old buttons any day.

...more on Valentine's Day

Christian and I decided to get each other a Kindle for Valentine's Day. So, no...it was not exactly a surprise to each other!

We never thought we would cave in and buy one of these gadgets. We do love our books! However, some time last year, during one of my book club meetings, one of the ladies showed me their Kindle and I was really surprised at how nice it looked!

I was still a bit stubbornly resistant to the idea at the time but I was now open to the possibilities.

What cinched the idea was our difficulty in getting some old books in print. George MacDonald is our new favorite author (although, he is not by any means a new author!). His work is actually in the public domain but reading a book off the computer is not my idea of pleasant. He has a handful of novels still being printed...but mostly children's and adult fantasy only. All his other work is out of print. There is an author who came out with some abridged versions of some of his novels but I would much rather have the originals. Besides, his work has also gone out of print and you can really only buy used copies. Therein lay our frustration!

In comes the Kindle. We figure that if we can download the complete works of George MacDonald from the public domain, it would already pay for the price of the Kindle and make it worth while! Not to mention, the fact that I can do that for some of my other favorite authors (e.g. Jane Austen, the Bronte Sisters, Edith Warton, Oscar Wilde, Frances Hodgson Burnett...the possibilities are endless!). So if you consider that, the Kindle was such a great deal!

Christian was also interested in the George MacDonald works but his other supporting works would include being able to download the Journals of Discourses and the History of the Church which would also more than pay for the device!

All that information at our fingertips! I haven't been so excited about something is a long time and have been inhaling new books ever since (whenever I get the chance).

Luckily for us, we did not really consider buying new books that much as we have since found out that some of the new books are just as expensive (if not more) as the printed books. Also, we had heard that the public library was offering e-books that you can borrow, but every book we looked up seemed to have a waiting list a mile long. So some of those things as well as formatting issues have cropped up as a problem but they aren't really anything that significant to our original reasons for getting a Kindle. It just would have been a nice option.

One of my favorite features of my new Kindle Touch is being able to touch a word that I do not know and have it pull up the word in the dictionary in an instant! It is especially useful in reading these old novels. They use a lot of archaic terms that just are not used today. I also like being able to highlight passages. I was never really one to highlight books (especially in my scriptures). It seemed like graffiti to me. But there are so many gems in my George MacDonald novels that I find that I am highlighting them all the time so I can talk about them with Christian when he gets home or just for future reference.

I have to say, I'm sold. I love it!

Valentine's Day

For lack of a better post, here is Valentine's day with the kids. We have been having a difficult time with them lately about, well, everything it seems. And we are left exhausted, frustrated and exasperated!

Anyway, their Auntie Marian came by before Valentine's day with gifts for our little miscreants.

Don't let the cute pictures fool you. And for some reason, every time we get together with Marian, I end up gaining weight...hmmm, I wonder why that is (any ideas Marian?!).

We set out some little Valentine gifts for the girls to see when they woke up in the morning and of course  they have their usual Valentine party/card exchange in their respective classes.

Apparently, Valentine's is the new Halloween. They got so much candy. It's insane! We had a nice dinner at home. Nothing really big or exciting...just a bit nicer fare than usual!

New Year Festival

On Saturday, we took the kids to the Chinese New Year Festival downtown. We've never been to it before so we decided to brave the crowds and check it out for the sake of the kids. It wasn't too bad, considering. Although, there were a lot of groups there performing that has nothing to do with Chinese New Year. Half the groups there don't seem to really even follow the lunar calendar but I guess it's slim pickings and they have to fill it out with some things.

They also had fireworks over the library at the end, but we did not stay that long to see it. Also, it was nice to run into a few friends while we were out and about.

I wanted to show the girls' the chinese pavilion in front of the library since it is usually locked up but it was swamped with weirdos in "manga" costumes most of the time. 

We mostly went to see the the lion dance though and that is always fun.

Chinese New Year

We went on Saturday to celebrate Chinese New Year, as usual, with my family. We usually go pretty early to help my mom get stuff started. We cooked and ate pretty much all day long (which doesn't do my goal of losing some weight any good...but, Chinese New Year only comes once a year!).

We had quite an assembly line going. It's nice how all the kids and grandkids can all help out now. It makes it go faster and makes it a lot more fun. Hopefully all the kids will all learn to do it so that we can keep the tradition going.

The kids got to collect lucky red envelopes from their grandparents and all their aunties and uncles!

New Year's day was actually on Monday. We had more chinese food for dinner and for FHE, we had special Chinese New Year crafts as an activity for the kids.

The kids worked on paper dragons while Christian worked on making "Spring couplets" to put up for an auspicious New Year.

Starry Starry Night

On the evening of January 3rd or the pre-dawn hours of January 4th, was to be the beginning of the Quadrantid meteor shower. We decided to stay up and try to catch it in a stop motion video.

Over a two hour period, which was supposed to be during the peak of the meteor shower in our time zone, we captured not one single falling star. We did, however, capture 23 air planes flying through just the camera's field of vision. That says nothing of the ones all around us, outside the camera's field of vision. Why is there so much traffic up there in the middle of the night?! It is totally insane.

We did each see two falling stars that were not captured on the camera. One big one that we both saw and two separate smaller ones that we saw on our own. So I can attest that there were at least all of 3 falling stars during that two hour period. And for our efforts, we just ended up cold, tired and disappointed.

I checked a bunch of youtube videos others had posted after the fact and found that many others had the same results as we did in other parts of the country (although, some supposed that the airplanes going across, were falling stars). Only one person seemed to have captured a halfway decent meteor shower.

Bike ride

We spent the rest of the kids' winter break just playing with new Christmas toys and working out in our back garden.

We did take the girls over to the university to ride around the empty campus though. Caitlyn got her training wheels off some time after school started for the new year, but was so anxious about riding without training wheels that she would only ride about a hundred feet at a time. She would spend 10 minutes just sitting there trying to psych herself into doing it. It was a very painful process. She could do it without problems, but she was just too afraid for some reason.

So during the break, we took advantage of the flat open spaces on campus to try to get her more comfortable riding.

She finally did it and she is doing great. We did have one set back, however...after riding around about 5 times in front of the library, she slid on one corner that was full of leaves and fell. She scraped her knee. After the initial pain and everything wore off, she did get back on and ride some more so I don't think it set her back too much.

She keeps one training wheel up a bit higher on her bike though. She uses it as a kick stand as her bike does not have one!