ANOTHER sleeping girl And MUDDY FUN

So I have yet another Hannah sleeping photo to post! She does enjoy her sleeps. While the boys have been off school, Hannah and Jacob have not been having their regular naps on the way to pick up the boys each day. Jacob is absolutely fine with that but Hannah still needs her "beauty sleep" in the day time. So here is the set up of this picture: The children and I had just come in from playing outside and we were having a little snack. They were all sitting at the table and I had my back to them cutting some apple for snack time.When I turned around, I found Hannah sitting with her eyes closed and head bobbing in her seat. So I called Shawn to come in and take a look and he decided we should lay her down on the couch before she cracked her head on the table (what a good Dad!). Shawn picked her up and, as you can see, she was none the wiser. He layed her down and she had a great little siesta on the couch.

And now on the Muddy Fun part of the post. It had been raining a bit yesterday (shock, shock) and the boys were outside with friends last night. They all decided it might be fun to slide down the hill where it was muddy. So Benjamin came to the window (it is SO nice to be on the ground floor), and said, "It's okay if I get dirty right Mom, I am wearing play clothes". I said sure and off he goes up the hill with the others. As I watch, I see the older boys sliding down the little hill on their feet, they did quite well on the slippery mud. Then I see my boys trying and, as you might guess, they can't stay quite as upright as the 11 and 12 year olds can. Benjamin came to the window again a little later crying because he had fallen face first down the hill. He had mud all over his face, in his mouth, his nose, everywhere! So I gave him a glass of water and told him to swish and spit outside. The other kids got a great kick out of this and soon he was laughing instead of crying. So I wiped his face a little with paper towel and he was back on his way up the hill! As you can see, they were a complete mess when they came in, but boy did they have fun!

Here is Alexander when he came in. He is yelling MUD!

A close up of his pants

Here is Benjamin when he came in. Not sure how his hand got so muddy becuase he was wearing two gloves!

So before we put the clothes in the washer last night, we decided to "rinse" them in the tub. It was just too gross not to take a photo!

Boxing Day Fun

We had a lovely day yesterday visiting with friends from all over the world. When I tried to count everyone from memory, I counted 33 people who came through our door for our "open house". We had some good sweeties which the children helped me bake over the last few days, some hot tea, cold drinks, but most of all, some great visiting with many of our new friends. The adults were able to visit in the kitchen while the children played in the toy room and helped us decorate our mural which our children helped create over the last couple of days. You can see below the finished product at the end of the evening yesterday which shows all the sheep the children who visited created as well as the shepherds and angels they colored. So to the far right is the nativity scene and the many sheep and shepherds are "keeping watch" when the angels come and give them the Good News. Everyone enjoyed the craft and now we are enjoying their handiwork!

The finished Masterpiece!

A close up of some of the sheep:

We are so blessed to have made so many good friends in such a short time here. We had friends visit who originally come from Canada, USA, Poland, Russia, Botswana, Pakistan, and Scotland. We are all in the same boat and it was nice to be able to share this special holiday time with them.
Hope your holidays have been just as nice!

CHRISTMAS DAY

Merry Christmas to everyone! We had a great day with only one moment of feeling like I was going to lose it because we are so far away from family and friends...We do have so many good friends here and were able to share today with alot of them and we look forward to having a good time with many more tomorrow as we host a sort of open house here. So here is a glimpse of our day:
Hannah and Jacob woke up at about 750am, Alexander at 815am, and we finally woke Benjamin up at 830am! Aren't we fortunate parents?? How many of you were up before 5am this morning?
Anyhow, we opened our socks, which were a big hit with all the children, they were quite content with their contents even if they didn't get other gifts....we did give them other gifts anyway!
We had a lovely breakfast at about 945am, had birthday cake, read the Christmas story,and sang happy birthday to Jesus at about 1015am, and then we had some friends come over around 11am to watch all the children open their gifts. It did make it seem more like Christmas at home with other people here for the children to "show off" their gifts to. They all loved their gifts and received many new toys to play for many days to come.
We had some outdoor play time, weather was a little overcast and about 4 degrees, played with the many new toys (Bingo and air hockey seem to be favorites so far), had a little supper/lunch and then the boys and I had a little sleepover (we watched a movie on our bed) after I put Hannah and Jacob to bed. All in all, a great day.

THE STOCKINGS

One of the biggest "hits" of the day were the new toothbrushes everyone got in their stockings. A and B got battery operated spinning Veggie Tales ones and H and J got ones with flashing lights on them. They must have brushed their teeth at least a dozen times in a couple hours.

THE GRUB

The gifts....
The "mural" behind the gifts was done by the children (with help from Dad of course). We are going to have the children who stop by for the open house make sheep tomorrow with cotton balls and glue to paste on the countryside. I'm not sure if you can see the little stars they have already pasted on and the big star which is over the nativity scene in the corner. Just wanted them to remember that the nativity scene and the angels, shepherds, etc were all important as they saw all the great gifts they received. Oh, and Benjamin is holding up the beater which he was licking from the whipped cream which was on Jesus' birthday cake! It was Yummy!!




Some good ol' American football on Christmas day. As close as we get to the NFL with no TV here. Actually, I am watching the scores on NFL.com now as I type this!!

And as I forgot to take our chicken out of the freezer until this morning, we did not have our Christmas dinner today, we will save that for tomorrow, so no pictures of a nice dinner for this post. So here is how we ended our day, Shawn was out doing dishes (what a guy!) and I was in laying on the bed with the boys watching Bob the Builder. Merry Christmas to me!

So we would love to hear how your Christmas day has gone. We miss our friends and family back home and we are very thankful for the many blessings God has given us here in Scotland.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

We hope you are all having a wonderful Christmas and that you remember that Jesus is the reason for the season. We have all the children snuggled in bed, presents all wrapped, have talked to many of our family in Canada and Australia and so I am now sitting down to post just a couple of pictures of our Christmas Eve. We attended a wonderful Christmas Eve children's service here in Edinburgh with some friends, came home for supper, the boys played outside as usual, they all had baths, got dressed in their "new" Christmas pajamas, and went to bed. I say "new" Christmas pajamas because they actually got them when we had our pre-Christmas Grammy Day back in November. So here is a photo for my Mom (and everyone else) of all the children watching their Christmas Eve video...nothing about Christmas; it was actually just a mighty machine video about trains, but that is what they picked to watch.


And some people have been asking about our decorations....they are small but mighty! Here is the bookcase when you walk in our flat, the bathroom is to the left and the linen closet to the right. The top shelf has our nativity scene and the middle has our little snowmen from Costco. Stay tuned for more of our decorations after Boxing Day as we are having a little open house for our friends and the children are all going to do a special craft as part of our Christmas decorating.
And here is our "Great Wall". It is the wall between our room and the toy room. The children have been hard at work coloring many pictures to put on the wall and we hung up some of the Christmas cards we have received. Thank you all for remembering us with the many cards.
Here is hoping you all have a safe and Happy Christmas in your part of the world.
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Christmas Parties

We just returned from Christmas Carolling and then a lovely time of hot chocolate, mulled wine, and Christmas sweeties at a friends' house. The children are all sleeping, Hannah is snoring away; I actually tried to get a video of it since it is very loud but it didn't turn out. We have been getting into the "Christmas Spirit" by attending lots of Christmas parties, doing Christmas baking, and finally, tonight, by carolling with friends. We even went to see the reindeer in Princes Street Gardens on Thursday but alas they had already left for the North Pole. Fortunately there was a great playground there to curb the disappointment.
So here are a few pictures of some of the Christmas parties we have attended.

We were able to go to the boys' school to watch some of their Christmas party and see Santa hand them a gift. Benjamin was sitting right in front of Santa and so he was too quick to get his picture taken. You can see him off to the right of Santa in the picture of Alexander getting his present. They both love going to school but are now loving being home all day and getting to play outside with their friends ALL day. I told them yesterday that they were outside longer than the sun was! We went to run errands and left at 10am, came home, they played outside with their friends, came inside for maybe 20 minutes for lunch, then went back outside ALL afternoon until 6pm when I finally dragged them in (almost kicking and screaming) for supper. So 8 hours outside. Sunrise was at about 845 am and sun set around 345pm. So 7 hours of sun. Strange huh?! Anyhow, all that to say they are enjoying themselves. Hannah and Jacob also spend a good deal of time outside but have to come in whenever I do so they can't stay out as long. They too enjoy themselves and we have some great friends here who love to come and play with Hannah and Jacob.



Hannah and Jacob and I attend a couple of different play groups in the mornings when Alexander and Benjamin are at school. So last week we had our final meetings of the playgroups and one had a great Christmas party with Santa. Santa was handing out gifts to all the children and many of them were crying and/or clinging to their moms when they went forward to get their gifts....Not Jacob! When his name was called, he jumped right up (literally jumped!) and went forward to get his gift. He was pretty excited. He was actually so fast I didn't even get a picture because I wasn't ready fast enough. Hannah went up as well but had to hold my hand while she went. And as you see in the picture, Jacob followed behind as well! They were pretty cute.


Here are Hannah and Jacob (to the right by the slide) amongst all the children at playgroup.

Christmas Pageant

Here are some photos of the church Christmas pageant which took place last Sunday morning. As you can see, the boys were portraying sheep in the play. They were VERY excited to be in the play with "the big kids". They had 2 lines in the play at different times....their first line was "BAA" and their second....you guessed it....."BAA". They did a terrific job!

A planning night

I don't have any scrapbooking pages to post today. However, I did get ALOT of pictures sorted and cropped! It was a late night last night as Benjamin is a little under the weather and Hannah and Jacob had a late nap yesterday so they weren't really tired at bedtime. Anyhow, I thought I would just do some cropping as it was getting late but I ended up doing ALOT and stayed up pretty late anyhow.
The other reason it was a late night is that I realized yesterday there were only 11 days left until Christmas (now only 10!). So I got out the little gifts I have gotten thus far for the children and had a look so that I can finish up the Christmas shopping soon. We are starting to decorate a little more with the Christmas pictures the children have been coloring. We have one wall in the hall/entryway that is getting quite covered with a collage of coloring book pages; it is quite nice if I do say so myself!
Anyhow, I hope your Christmas preparations are coming along nicely. And please let us know how your plans and your day is going.

Cookie Exchange

I thought I would share my favorite Christmas recipe with everyone who cares to read. It is a really easy recipe for Christmas chocolates; however, they have also been made as Valentine's day chocolates, Easter chocolates, "I really want some sweets" chocolates, etc.
The only ingredients are 1 cup of chocolate chipits, 1 cup of butterscotch chipits, 1 cup of peanut butter chipits, and 1 cup of crushed potato chips.
You just slowly melt all the chipits together in the microwave, stirring frequently. Then add finely crushed potato chips and stir! Drop them into the little mini-muffin cups and refrigerate to harden. They are very yummy!! If you are in Scotland, you can't make them unless you have someone from North America bring over the butterscotch and peanut butter chipits since I haven't been able to find them here. Chocolate chipits are hard enough to find and quite expensive to buy just a little bag.
Anyhow, hope you get to try them out and let me know what your favorite Christmas recipe is!
I am doing a cookie exchange tonight with some friends here and these are what I have made for the exchange. Mom and Grammy brought over the chipits from Canada when they were here in November. Don't they look yummy???
On another note, I am waiting for all those scrapbook pages from last week everyone!! Hee Hee. Shawn reminded me that it was quite some time before I posted my first page when we started this whole thing. This is a very busy time of year for everyone; just make sure you are taking lots of pictures to use after New Year! And by the way, Deidra and Janique, you guys can join the challenge and just email the pages to us if you want OR you could start a blog! It is very easy to do.

SCRAPBOOKING CHALLENGE

I haven't been feeling the greatest the last few days so I hadn't really wanted to scrapbook tonight. However, when I called my friend who was coming over, she was out so I didn't cancel. We talked a little later after the children were all in bed and we decided to scrapbook for a bit. I am VERY glad we did. It always feels so good to get caught up on things (both scrapbooking and what is happening in each others' lives). I am so thankful for this scrapbooking crew who encourage me and give me some great ideas from their pages...thanks ladies!!
I hope you all have a good night scrapbooking.
I managed to do 2 2-page layouts as you will see below plus I did a page of Alexander and Benjamin's first day of nursery school which I will not post here at this time. It is hard to get a good picture of the two page layouts but you can get the general idea and see that, yes, I did do some work tonight!

THE LATEST VICTIM...

The family hair clippers have attacked their latest victim....
No, I did not decide to shave my head. Nor did Hannah.....
Jacob's hair was getting a bit long even though he still had very little of it. So we decided to go for it and give him a buzz like his brothers. Shawn did the honors this time and I think it looks great; even if a bit different. It will take some getting used to. But boy does he look like his brothers now! Here are some pictures of our adventure last night:

Here is the BEFORE photo. His hair was pretty long in the back and on the sides. He was starting to get the 70s "feathering" effect!
So then this happened and you will have to scroll down to get the results!




And here is our little guy looking much like his brothers.
First with his proud clipper-weilding papa:



And then the side view.


So stay tuned for exciting news from the hair world with Hannah and I! Just teasing...no plans for big changes for us! The clippers are away until the boys' hair gets a little longer.

YEP, WE'RE IN SCOTLAND!

Last night was one of those moments when it suddenly hits me...yep, we're in Scotland.
See the post below for pictures from our church Christmas party. The games in that post were played before we all shared a meal together, although they were a little different from the games we played in Canada, the evening was seeming like a normal Canadian Church Christmas party. So we played the games, we had a lovely meal, then they cleared the tables away, and....
Get ready for this all you Canadian Baptists....
We had dancing!! Yes, right after the meal, they started playing music and we had a good-ol' Ceilidh dance in the church hall! It was terrific.
Since we had already attended a Ceilidh (and now I can't remember how to spell that word) at our weekend away in October, we were familiar with some of the dances. It is kind of like squaredancing. We all had a great time and I even got a few pictures snapped when Shawn was partnering with Alexander and Benjamin. Hannah and Jacob also did some of the dances in our arms and they seemed to love it as well. They had been asleep in our room when we attended the last Ceilidh at the hotel.
So here are some of the pictures:

Here are Benjamin and Shawn doing one of the dances together. We were glad that Benjamin jumped right in to dance since he was too shy to do it last time.

And here is Alexander smiling away as he dances next to his Dad (whose head I managed to cut off again!)
And one of the dances required a three person grouping, just right for a dad of twins! A little more of Shawn's head made it into the picture!

Church Christmas Party

Last night we had our church Christmas party. They had some great games, great food, and great singing. As well we got to know a few more people from our congregation. I thought the timing was going to be a little long for the children (the party was from 330-730) but the time flew by and we all had a great time. So here are a few pictures of the children playing the games.

This one was called Chinese ladder, I think. It was alot of fun for the children and alot of fun for the parents to watch.

And this one was a little strange....but when in Scotland.....
The little red thing is a fish and they had to take newspaper and slap at the fish until it flipped to the end of the room (kind of fanning the fish to make it go)

And here is Alexander having a shot at the fish.

And finally, here is the pass the parcel game (like hot potato except when the music stops you unwrap one layer of paper on the present)