The Hartland

The past few weeks have flown by! Our biggest activity is represented by the slide show at the top of the screen. We spent a week at Disney World in celebration of David's 5th birthday. Although David's birthday is in March we decided to wait to go to on this vacation until a slower time of year at the park. This turned out to be one of the best decisions as we were told that we visited the park during the slowest week of the year!

Some of the highlights from our trip included the following....

1. A lot of pleasant together time as a family (even our teenager had a good time)!

2. David got to meet his two favorite Disney characters.....

Ariel (from the Little Mermaid)

June (from Playhouse Disney's Little Einsteins)

3. Celebrating David's birthday at dinner every night (and for one breakfast)!

4. The weather, it was in the low 80's and sunny every day.

5. Meeting up with friends on our second to last day.

Emily and her good friend Jordan, whose family came down the day before we left.

6. The rides!!

7. The way Disney does everything down to the smallest details!

Signs found by where Mike and Sulley (from Monster's Inc.) were signing autographs

On another note, Ella and I both came down with strep throat almost as soon as we got home. We were thankful that this did not happen on our trip and that it's easily treatable.

The next bit of excitement for us was hosting Thanksgiving dinner! This is always a good time. We did miss having Thom & Katherine, Jennifer & Joe (and kids), and Scott's sister Julie. Our evening started out early by a group effort of searching the shopping ads for the best deals on Black Friday. Once lists were made we put the finishing touches on the food and chowed down!

Talking on the phone with Thom

Food prep

As I promised last year we did serve dinner buffet style. It made things a lot easier and people were able to enjoy their food and not worry about having to pass the potatoes, etc!

I don't know how many of you were up early on Black Friday but I was up and out the door by 3:40am in order to get in line at Kohl's. I got Emily up with me, as requested, but she backed out on going shopping with me, no surprise there! Please note that I did not get in line that early for myself but to get some deals asked for by my mother, do I get daughter of the year award for this?! I was in and out of the door quickly and in line at Target by 4:20.

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While waiting in the freezing weather outside Target, I met a woman who lives just down the street from me (I found this out by conversing with her and her daughter). She and her family have lived there for 35 years and it was fun to hear them talk about our house and the farm it used to include "back in the day". Apparently our house used to be painted white wood on the outside and the farmer who lived here would pay the neighborhood children $5 for a black rat snake because he didn't want to deal with cats to control the mice in his barns.

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I got in and out of Target quickly and headed to Meijer and bought a few things there and was home and back in bed by 6:00am. I slept in till 8:30 and then got Emily up (for the second time) and we went shopping for some deals on clothes for her wardrobe.

Later on that evening we had our friends the Apthorpe's over for dinner and an evening of good times and friends. We exchanged Christmas gifts and let the kids play while we chatted and caught up on life.

While they were over an unexpected even occurred, David lost his first tooth! We're not really sure when this happened during the evening's events but when the kids were getting some ice cream and hot cocoa I looked at David wondering what was wrong with his mouth and realized that he has a tooth missing! The thing is that he also had one coming up right behind where his baby tooth had fallen out, much like Ella did when she lost her first tooth.

That night David wrote the tooth fairy a note letting her know that he had quite literally "lost" his tooth. We couldn't find it anywhere. David woke up the next morning with the note still under his pillow and a very long face when waking me up to tell me that the tooth fairy had not come. Big oops! A little bit later he went back upstairs to get his tooth fairy note so that we could email her (yes, you can do that) and he found that she must have been "pulling" (pardon the pun) a late shift and had left David a new webkinz as a present for losing his first tooth. All long faces were forgotten and naming the new dragon webkinz was now top priority.

Jason had a teaching moment with David and Ella this past Sunday afternoon. I had purchased a new toaster at Target on Friday and was throwing out our old one when Jason decided to take it apart. David helped Jason unscrew the outside and the lesson in mechanics and circuit electricity began. I'm not sure how much they picked up but they had a good time taking apart something so familiar and seeing how it worked. They also had a good time just being kids.

Adoption Update:

There is not much to tell right now. We are still awaiting a referal from our agency but were emailed last week that our paperwork passed inspection here and is officially on it's way to Addis Ababa, the capital in Ethiopia. It's a step in the right direction!

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I'm sure December will fly by even faster than November. So until our next post please stop, remember and praise God that Jesus Christ is THE reason for this CHRISTmas season.