Heather's Home

Sunday, January 12, 2014

School Christmas Concerts

All four of our kids are at four different schools this year. Which means the week of school Christmas concerts was pretty hectic! But we were fortunate that none of their concerts were on the same night as each other. And of course, high schools don't do Christmas concerts so it was just the younger three.

Hudson's playschool concert was adorable, of course.

Connor's school put on a Christmas play about a blizzard that snows in the kids and threatens to keep them at school for the entire Christmas holiday (oh no!). Connor's grade was too young to be in the play but they did a great job of providing the live music for the play with their cute singing.

Maira's school also performed a play and the grade one classes were in the front row of the singers. Their songs and their actions were very cute. I'll post movies from all the concerts on Youtube.

Shae's 15th Birthday

Shae just keeps getting older and older, darn it! Fifteen already, it's hard to believe but what a wonderful fifteen-year old she is. We are blessed beyond words to have her in our family. She's a great example for her younger siblings to follow.

Her birthday was pretty different this year as it happened on the same weekend as Jess' grandmother's funeral. So, after school on Friday, she went to the waterpark at the Mall with some friends to celebrate her birthday and then we picked her up at the Mall and we headed out on the highway towards Raymond as the funeral was the next morning. We sang happy birthday to her in the car and she opened her presents from us in the back seat as we drove through the dark frigid winter night. Not ideal but it was the best we could do considering the circumstances. She also got to pick her very favourite treat at our pit stop: poutine and hot chocolate.

With it being such a busy weekend, we didn't get a lot of pictures of her birthday. These are her gifts from me and Jess:

And here she is with the Harry Potter cake I made for her for her birthday dinner we had with family a couple of days after her birthday, once we got home from the funeral. It's a copy of the cake Hagrid brought to Harry for his birthday when he got invited to attend Hogwarts.

Shown below is an image of the actual cake in the movie that I was copying:

I think Shae was the only one in the room who instantly recognized where the cake is from and knew why it was so ugly and spelled wrong!

Anyway, happee birthdae Shae, we love you SOOOO much!

American Thanksgiving

With a brand new American sister-in-law living in Edmonton, I decided to host an American Thanksgiving dinner at the end of November.

Fall Lessons

Hudson wanted to take skating lessons again this year, Maira wanted to try dance, and Connor decided to continue with his karate lessons. It just so happened that their lessons were all on the very same night, which was nice in some ways but it also made for a very busy and hectic Wednesday night!

Yes, that's me dancing beside Maira. For parents night, the kids were able to invite a parent out onto the dance floor to learn a routine alongside the kids. Even though it looks like it in the pictures, I wasn't the only mom out there, I swear.