almost a month!

Sometimes I'm good at keeping up on blogging and sending my mom pictures, but sometimes I really stink at it! November has been one of the "stinky" times I guess. Since the excitement I wrote about earlier this month, nothing exciting has happened. Maybe that's why I haven't taken or posted pictures all month.

Makenzie made a little bed for Seth while they were watching tv in my room. Seth LOVED it!



The kids had no school Tuesday or Wednesday because of ice, Thursday and Friday because of Thanksgiving, and of course Saturday and Sunday. That was a pretty big vacation! We got about four to six inches of snow now, though, so school should be open again on Monday.

Thanksgiving weekend is a fun time for my older three kids. Joel and Luke are at the cabin with Jason's dad and brother, and Makenzie is at the "Nutcracker" ballet with Jason's mom. She gets a new Christmas dress every year and wears it for the first time to the ballet :-)


Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because it's all about being thankful and eating food :-) It's also a super busy time because of making all that food and then starting on all the Christmas hoopla. This year, I'm seeing the holiday commercialism more than ever since I'm swamped with Christmas card set-up at work. I'm thankful for the extra hours (bigger paycheck), though!

Jason found this article in a book from one of his classes and it expresses our thoughts exactly:

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Welcome to Holland

Parenting a Special Needs Child

By Emily Perl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this:

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans: the Coliseum, Michelangelo's David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills – and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy ... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away, because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you many never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

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I believe that all parents are blessed, but that I'm the most blessed.

nice, easy excitement

Life has gotten pretty much "normal" again. "Normal" with four children is not the "normal" person's "normal," but it's so much better than e.r. ABnormal!!

Luke and Jason made a little racecar for the Awana Grand Prix (I think that's what it's called). Wednesday night, Luke got to race his car against 40-something other little racecars. He won two of his heats, and he was so excited!


We have enough snow now to make a cute little snowman -- which Luke did almost completely on his own since Joel quit helping because Luke wouldn't let him be the boss.


Seth is all healed up and so cute this morning that I just had to take his picture. I'm not a great photographer, so the picture doesn't really convey the level of cuteness that he had going on in his little green corduroy shirt and jeans this morning.