St Nicholas resource

I was just pointed to this wonderful website by my friend Jenny in CT. Mamma Jenny is using some of the suggestions from it for her parish's outreach for St. Nicholas Day.
It is a wonderful resource and very fitting as we prepare to celebrate the feast of St Nicholas on December 6th!

Winter Wonderland

This is not a typical November for Vancouver. 20 cm are predicted to fall overnight. The city is beautiful; the drivers are not. No one here has a clue how to drive in the snow. We have already had a successful attempt at snowman making.
Quite a change from Florida! Look at the below post and see what I was wearing two weeks ago in the evening! It is 0'c (32'F) and 60 km/h winds are predicited.

Many Years to Mitzi and Todd

This is the whole family celebrating my brother's wedding. It was a beautiful day. All four of my children were in the wedding party. I made the girl's dresses. They seemed to turn out well. They did a fabulous job: Margaret and Esme were flower girls, Niko was the ring bearer and Elijah was the junior groom's man. I did a reading at the wedding and my husband said the prayer before dinner. We are all very tired now! I was shocked by how grown up Elijah looked standing at the front of the church. He really is becoming a man. I am not sure I am ready for that. Esme loves her new aunt and I can tell that Mitzi has a big influence on her...during the dance at the reception Mitzi and Esme were shaking up the dance floor! We couldn't get Esme to leave to go to bed.
The little ones love running around and playing with all of the other kids--there were tons of them. I had to keep a very watchful eye on them; the lake had ALLIGATORS in it.
I am not kidding......I don't know about these folks in Florida.










This is the present I made for my brother and sister in law. It is a duvet cover, 2 sets of pillow cases and various pillows. I think that they really liked it. My house was chaos before we left: me working and trying to sew all this and the flower girl dresses!


I will try and post some pictures of the rest of our holiday soon.

Things I learned in Texas

So there are some interesting things that I have learned during my sojourn in The Woodlands, Texas:
1-Watch out for Fire Ants (they have that name for a reason)
2-When it rains...it RAINS. In BC it rains a great deal of the time, but in TX it rains the same amount, but in about 45 minutes.
3-The mosquitos are BIG...and hungry
4-It is possible to have seven children; as long as their are four parents
5-Texas is waaaay too far away from BC.

BFF

How can you tell if you are with REALLY good friends? Everyone is on their own lap top in the same room chatting while blogging / working / checking email /shopping. Does it get better than this?
We are in Texas staying with our friends-in-the-trenches. We have had a fabulous weekend. We went to Blue Bell Creamery and had a tour of the yummy ice cream factory. Now the kids are plotting out the states in which we can purchase this new favourite.

Here are all SEVEN kids that have been under the same roof for the last four days. This is outside of Blue Bell Creamery.


This pic is of the two 2 yrs olds. They are having a blast! They met when M was 8 months old and G was 10 days old; now they are both 2 yrs old and fast friends.
Texas is too far away :(