dave & janet horsman ::: keepin’ it real since 1998

In the late afternoon today, we set out to find a body of water to skate on. My dad bought all of us (except Phoebe) skates for Christmas. The snow was falling perfectly like a snow globe so we headed out. A parking lot pretty close to our house that was flooded served as the pond. A shovel, which some nice people let us use to clear the snow off the thin sheet of ice, was our Zamboni. And Katherine served as babysitter of the baby girl. It was a so fun as we skated! Some of us were much better than others (I only lasted 10 minutes), but this will be an afternoon that will last in our Christmas memories. This video is a snapshot of the afternoon. I love that my kids are honest, but how do you teach them to be tactful?

“…I must have done something good.”

My lovely husband is giving me an early Christmas present this evening.  We’re going out on a date…first to dinner, and then to see The Sound of Music at the Ordway!  Whoa!  This is a dream come true…well, actually… I dared to dream much bigger than this.  I dreamed of playing Fraulein Maria in The Sound of Music one day.  But then again, I also dreamed of getting married and having four children.  :)  I wonder if I thought I could do both at once? 

P.S.  Did you know that on my seventeenth birthday Dave serenaded me at my bedroom window with “You are Sixteen, Going on Seventeen?”  I know…how romantic.  But I remember feeling so embarrassed that I wouldn’t even go to the window!  I suppose it didn’t help that my mother and two sisters were in the room with me getting a great kick out of it.  Poor Dave!

P.P.S.  This will probably be the last post from me for a couple of weeks (although Dave may post some photos on Christmas day).  We have a busy few days coming up, and then, on Boxing Day - also known as the day after Christmas for my non-Canuck readers - we are leaving for Toronto to visit my sister, Jill, and her family!  Hooray!  We’re very excited. 

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

We had a snowflake-making contest last evening, and I was deemed, by my two eldest sons, to an unfair judge, which I had to agree with.  We need some impartial judges!  So, I turn to you, my dear blog readers, to help choose a winner.  Here are the entries. (Only four, since you needed to be five or older to compete, and even that seemed to be a stretch.  Dave and I watched with our hearts in our throats as Zeke cut his snowflake!  You need to use heavy-duty sissors to cut through multiple folds in paper…oh dear, I’m thankful Zeke didn’t cut a finger off!)

Super Zeke by Zeke (notice all the Zs?)

Circles of Distruction by Dave

Jaqueline Frost by Janet

Victor o’ Votes by Elijah

We all made several, but the rules were that we had to use the first snowflake that we cut.  Here are a few more of my favs…

Look what I caught my monkey of a son doing today…

I suppose the fact that I ran to get the camera, and then got him to tilt the milk jug up one more time so that I could get a photo, did nothing in the way of teaching him not to do this.  The legnths I go to for you people. 

I love this picture.

Noah has been quite taken with all the Christmas decor.  All of the ornaments, large and small, were inspected by him as they made their exodus from the Christmas storage boxes.   It was really cute.  He was so excited about everything.  In fact, we could probably forego having any gifts for him on Christmas morning, he’s been loving all the decorations so much! 

One thing that he has especially enjoyed is my collection of Christmas cards.  I save some of my favorites from year to year, and put them out.  After I’d set them all up on a table in our living room over the weekend, he spent some time studying each picture.  A little while later, I heard him exclaim, “Yep!  That’s it…”

He’s since matched some other cards and decorations together, and is pretty proud about each discovery…

How interesting!  All three of my boys have different, quirky ways of thinking.  Elijah’s the organizer, Zeke’s the pattern-maker, and Noah, it seems, is a matchmaker!  Won’t it be interesting to see how these traits display themselves in adulthood?