Monday, December 18, 2017

DECEMBER!


  




Our girls participated in the annual live Nativity done by our friends, which took place this year on their farm! Brooklyn sang in the angel choir, and Kate recited the part of Anna, who met the baby Jesus at the temple. She did fantastic! Tomorrow is the last night, and will hopefully be the best weather yet! The first two weeks were so windy some of the kids nearly blew away!



After a long and grueling saga, we put Christmas lights on our house for the first time ever! I've wanted to do this pretty much forever, but the logistics of the sheer height and steep pitch of the roof were daunting. I had this vision of a framework built on the ground, with lights attached, which we could raise up to the face of the house. I was going places with this idea. The Lundell fortune was going to be built on Christmas light hanging. Alas, the gods of physics did not agree with me, and while I still think my idea has potential, we tabled it for another year. Meantime, Travis borrowed our neighbor's super high ladder and pulled up his big boy shorts and put those lights up there like a man. Stay tuned for next year's exploits!

Kate's ballet studio held a Christmas performance this year, with excerpts from the Nutcracker.

You can't really see her in this video. She's in the back. But just take my word for it that she's doing what everyone else is doing.
  
I couldn't leave this one out.
Travis and his buds singing Christmas carols at our church's Christmas party:

We make a goal to fill December with 25 days of service, in correlation with our church's Light the World campaign.
Admittedly, this can be a challenge with what is already the busiest month of the year, so sometimes we sneak in little acts of service like holding a door for someone! But I think this year we've filled our list pretty well. I know this is basically brag-blogging, which no one likes, but I need to catalog this for ideas for future years. We rang the Salvation Army bell, filled orders at the food pantry, donated blood, made dinner for families of patients at the children's hospital where Travis works, cleaned the church and the temple, babysat for friends, and made baskets of cookie-baking kits for struggling families.




This year our Christmas recital for my piano students was a "Victorian Caroling Party" theme.
The students all learned vintage Christmas carols, many of which they didn't know, and those who were confident enough in their playing accompanied the audience while we sang.
We wore scarves for festive-ness (well, some of us) and drank hot wassail and ate cookies.
Troy has really taken off with piano lessons. I only teach Kate and Troy - Brooklyn takes lessons from a friend (whose boys I teach) because that's just how it works for us! But Troy has decided that he really loves piano and practices literally every day (sometimes more than once a day!) Hopefully this will be a lifelong love and not just a passing phase! This video is awesome and accurately depicts his [over] confidence in his playing ability!

And speaking of my enthusiasm for music ad nauseam, particularly around the Christmas season, this year Travis surprised me with tickets to see the KC Symphony perform Handel's Messiah. It was a gift for the 15th anniversary of the day we met, which, embarrassingly, I did not know.




Nolan got to host his play group at our house a couple weeks ago, and we baked and decorated Christmas cookies!


Then he passed out on the couch during Kate's piano lesson.

This is still probably my favorite picture ever and has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas.
 Even Superman kneels in prayer.

0 sweet nothings: