Christmas decoration - done :)

The day after Thanksgiving was met with great excitement by my lovely daughters. Why? Well, they could get all the Christmas decoration out and have fun.
I enjoyed taking pictures and having some tea while the girls enjoyed themselves and decorated the house. Jamie put up all the lights on the windows, the Christmas tree and the garland in the kitchen. Nina decorated the rest. It looks beautiful and all the little light chains bathe the rooms in a beautiful, cozy, warm light. We enjoy sitting here and just taking in this wonderful atmosphere.

Jamie untangling the lights for the Christmas tree

draping the lights around the tree

the garland in the kitchen on one side

the other side

done :)

Isn't it beautiful?

Happy Thanksgiving

Today is Black Friday and I am at home, I have no desire to leave the house today. The kids are excited because today is the day we decorate for Christmas! We are almost done and I am taking a break to write this blog post. I hope everyone had a blessed Thanksgiving! We had a nice Thanksgiving. It was  our first Thanksgiving sitting at our really nice and new dinette set :) The food turned out really well. The turkey was great, I seasoned it and added some fresh rosemary and sage and then closed the bag and put the bird in the oven. We had potato dumplings, carrots with peas in a sour cream sauce with parsley, sweet corn, stuffing, coleslaw and a vegetarian turkey.  Jamie was happy that I had a vegetarian option for her :) For dessert we had mango jello with real whip cream. Though this is not the typical american meal for Thanksgiving, we really enjoyed and were very stuffed afterwards. We talked about being thankful for the many blessings we have in our lives and how blessed we are to even live in a part of the world where we have an abundance in everything. Even if we are 'poor', in comparison to the majority of the world we are still rich....
It was wonderful to be together and have time to talk and enjoy each others company. Somehow there seems to be so little time for that in everyday life. I wish we could change that.
Later we had some homemade pumpkin cheesecake, that with some coffee was delicious!
We watched the movie "Amish Grace" and talked about that for a long time. We had a good discussion about the amish and their faith and our faith. We concluded that we would not want to live like the amish, but we can certainly glean from them. Their lives a kept purposefully simple and maybe we should try to simplify a little bit. We talked a long time about forgiveness and how I realized last year, when I saw "Amish Grace" the first time, that forgiveness is not something you do once and then are done. You may have to do it over and over again. For some things it is impossible to forgive without God's help. One quote in the movie was " Forgiveness has to come from an open heart, or it won't come at all."  It was a good day. Thank you, Lord for all your providence!

stuffed turkey with rosemary and sage, so good :)

the new dinette set 

our very cute but simple Thanksgiving table setting

A new dinette set :)

When we moved to Minnesota, we were blessed with a dinette set. Which was really, really wonderful, we could sit at a table and eat versus holding our plates in our laps. Now, four years later the table has worked well for us, but was showing signs of age. For about a year we kept tightening the legs but after a few days the screws came loose again. I guess you could say I have - well, had, - some screws loose ;-)   Since the table top was tile, it was pretty heavy. I think that added to the wear of the table.
The other day I decided to finally get a new dinette set. So the kids and I went to Ikea :)  We it really like going there. I could find a LOT of beautiful things there - sigh.  So, we all went and looked at tables and chairs and finally decided on a table and found chairs which are very similar to the ones we had in Germany. That made us feel very good, kind of like getting our stuff, which is still in storage in Germany. When we got home it was late but Jamie and I build the table and Jamie with a little help from Jeremy put all the chairs together. We had our first breakfast on our new dinette set :)
The only thing we had to do with the chairs was finish them. So I went to Walmart and bought some spray finish. Jamie Sanded the seat down, so it would be smooth after sanding and then treated all four chairs. It was pretty hard to wait for 24 hours before we could use the chairs, but we did it and now have a beautiful table and chairs! Thank you Jamie for all of your hard work!!!!!  I love you !!!!

my Jamie - thank you Love!

still sanding the chair...

the left chair is before, the right chair is after sanding and spraying.

The "little" guy starts the Birthday parties...

Jeremy is the first of my three lovely children to start with Birthdays, which we will be celebrating once a months from now and end the last one in January. I have often wished that the kid's Birthdays would have been in the summer and we could have lovely garden parties, decorated gazebos and lovely warm breeze accompanied by lots of children's laughter. Do you remember Meat Loaf's song " Two out of three ain't bad" ?  Well, in this case it is more like one out of four ain't bad :)  We have parties and we have decorations and we have lots of children's laughter. Because we live in a rather small apartment, we have to 'outsource' the parties. This year my 'little' guy wanted to go to a Go-Cart place, which proved to be waaayyy too expensive. So he thought about Paintball - really???? In my mind I could see injured and crying kids and very upset moms. That didn't sound like a lot of laughter. Luckily he finally settled on a trampoline park. We had a part of the trampoline park just for us for 30 min. That was really great and the kids enjoyed themselves very much and bounced all over the place. They threw the balls and played some sort of trampoline-dodgeball. They were jumping and falling and bouncing and running and laughing. After the thirty minutes we had to leave that private court and join the public, which was much more crowed, as there were about three or four more Birthday parties at the same time. The kids jumped and played for another sixty minutes after which they were very hot and exhausted. I think they were kind of happy that they got to sit down and have pizza, something to drink and cupcakes. Jeremy had a great time and enjoyed the company of his siblings and friends. After we got home and he had a shower he fell exhausted and happy into his bed. We had a fun day celebrating his 11-th Birthday. Though to me the past 11 years seemed more like 11 months  :)

Siblings :)

trampoline-dodgeball

yeah, well, the camera didn't do well with kids in mid-air

Everyone is enjoying pizza and something to drink

Happy Birthday, mein kleiner Frosch :D