I have the kids at the pool today…

... And Elias is hanging out in the hot tub and using the jets to inflate his swimming shirt...

Annual Christmas Tree Cutting Trip

We made it out two weekends ago for our Christmas tree trip... which would not be complete without a giant cast iron pot of beans-n-weanies for lunch and a thermos full of real hot chocolate.  We found a nice one for the family and the kids each took a small tree for their rooms.  We all packed into the truck and listened to Christmas carols on the way up.  The picture-perfect day was only momentarily disrupted by skirmishes and fed-up-edness... but we'll choose to remember these images and moments instead....

Christmas Spirit Building on September Drive

With some snow this week, the kids have helped out older folks at a couple houses on our street by shoveling their driveways and stairs.  One fella has a bad hip, the other relies heavily on a walker.  It's been really sweet to each of the kids get such a huge burst of positive feelings by helping others.

The kids came up with the added idea to build a snowman outside the picture window of the gentleman across the street from us.  We noticed two days ago that the whitetails had discovered the carrot nose and eaten it off... the kids got a kick out of that, but thought it was even better that some other anonymous neighbor had replaced it with a fresh carrot by the time they got home from school that day.  

At the dinner table last night, Maille, Finn, and Elias were all agreeing how good it made them feel to help someone who needed a hand.   Finn described the strength of the good feelings this way:  "Well, if feelings were something you could measure, and say you had 1 liter of bad angry feelings, it would only take about 2 drops of these good feelings to cancel all that badness out."  How awesome is that?  And way to go metric!

We'll be putting some Christmas lights up for that fellow across the street, and we'll keep replacing the carrot as long as the snowman stands.  The Christmas Spirit is alive and well on September Drive...

Can't argue with that...

I spent some time on Saturday getting Christmas lights put up on and around the house. Maille had been in her room most of the morning, reading a new book that she was really excited about and couldn't tear herself away from. Something about a young girl with some kind of power in some sort of challenging situation.

It was a beautiful sunny day, so I encouraged her to come outside with me and lend a hand or just hang out with me we put lights up and listened to Christmas songs. She gave it a good honest try for a while, then started getting kind of antsy and twitchy, having been away from her book for a while. She came up to me and gently said, "Dad, I'm trying really, really hard to be a good, interactive daughter. But this just isn't working."  All I could do was smile at her and tell her to go ahead back to her book. She squealed, get a little jump, give me a big hug, and ran away…. 

Park planning

The city has selected an empty lot just down the road from us to build
a brand-new bike skills park with jumps and hills and all sorts of
features. They held two planning sessions this week and I took Maille
and Finn to them both… They were both super engaged and contributed
quite a few comments on what they thought some good design ideas would
be. With luck the city will begin construction this spring, and the
kids can be writing in their new park this summer!

Really cool to see the kids so engaged in this community planning process…