Christmas 2009

Christmas 2009

Christmas 2009

Christmas 2009

Christmas 2009

Family Pictures

We had a wonderful Christmas, staying home with our family, just the 5 of us. On Christmas eve, we gathered together, watched the 'church movie' 'Joy to the World' and read the Christmas story in Luke 2, singing many Christmas songs. The girls were really into it, which made it really nice. Jonkje must have felt good too as he was mostly happily quiet. It was just really special in a sweet way. Then on Christmas morning the girls were ofcourse very excited, and they got spoiled! The had each a craft to put mosiac stickies on beautiful drawings of unicorns (Sofia) and a castle (Lilian). IN the same trend they received a toy unicorn and pegasus, which they have played with together ever since! They also each got a scooter ('step' in NL), some clothes and a new tennis racket that was finally the right size!

I am so glad to see that they are really enjoying their gifts, especially when they were excited to go in their new trainings suit on their scooter, with their tennis racket to the tennis courts in our neighborhood to play tennis with mama, yeah! They have had already many hours of fun craft time with the mosaic stickers and made beautiful pictures, which would make nice decorations for their room someday! Jonkje has been super excited about his xylophone and truck that Santa brought him, and he too now has some clothes that fit (met z'n dikke buik! :) ).

We had a wonderful time, with a delicious dinner that we were very lucky to share with the De Moors family. They were so much fun to have around, Vendella (the mom) is really fun and active, and her children Moroni, Dimitrius and Chastity were a lot of fun to have around, open, interesting and interested, and we all had a fun time playing 'catch phrase'. They stayed throughout the evening and the day couldn't have been better, partly because of them coming over! So glad we invited them!

The next day we finally went to get family pictures taken, again at Portrait Innovations in Newnan. Sofia's 1 tooth was kind of hanging out (both front top teeth are now history!), and the pics were a little blurry. However, we are still happy to have been able to get new pictures!

Here are some of our favorites:

Ice-Skating in Atlanta

The afternoon before Christmas Eve, the kids and I drove to Atlanta to meet papa in Centennial park to go skating. We first played in the play park there for a long time, and all the kids seemed to have a really good time going down the slides, swinging and being on the monkey bars. After that, the girls and I skated for more than an hour, while Josh watched our littlest monkey. The girls were having a wonderful time, and I was really proud of them skating all by themselves. They may not be quite ready for the Olympics, but since we only have been skating 1x/year, I thought they were doing really well. I was mainly very happy that they enjoyed it so much, and that they didn't give up, even after falling quite a few times. Way to go, girls! We all had a wonderful time, although Josh was frozen by the time we were done (he didn't have the nice sleeping bag in a stroller that Jasper had). Looking forward to special Christmas time!