True Beauty

Ever since Delia and her classmates have been in 4th grade, I've been leading them in a twice monthly Bible Study at church.  Eighth grade is the last year of this ministry for girls this age and I wanted to be sure it was a super special year for my girls, who've been listening to me for five year now.  After studying Esther and learning how she was a woman of "True Beauty", both inside and out, these girls have been immersed in a year of special guests encouraging them to take care of their character and their bodies.  

Ms. Jetta visited our class to teach us about hospitality.  She told us her story of taking care of foster babies and how she keeps her home always open for anyone.  We made her special S'mores Bars with her and then practiced hospitality ourselves by assembling care packages for all the young ladies of our church currently away at college.

Another night, Ms. Melinda came to talk to us about "the hairs on our head" and to teach us about hair styling by giving every girl in the group a fancy, formal hairdo.  This night was one of our favorites, as our class of middle school girls, from different schools and different friend groups, really bonded over fellowship, looking up fun hairdos on Pinterest, and curling one another's hair.  

(These adorable girls all slept sitting up-- or so they told me-- so they could keep their fancy hair for school the next day!)

Ms. Beth, a professional cosmetologist, came to teach us how to take care of our hands.  She taught us the legit 12 step manicure process and painted intricate designs on everyone's ring finger.  We discussed how our hands can be beautiful with colored polish, but even more, with service.

Ms. Mikaela, who sells Rodan and Fields products, came to teach us how to take care of our skin.  She gave us lots of good info for keeping our skin clean and safe from the sun and things that might damage it.  Then we all got to do masks-- the fun kind! ;)  Fun fact: when we first moved here and I taught this girls' group the first time around, Mikaela was one of my 4th graders!  She is now a mom to 3 kids.

 Ms. Denise came with a special service project for us-- card stamping.  She brought TONS of amazing supplies that she had labored over preparing and walked us through making 3 original hand-stamped cards.  One of those cards we used to send notes of encouragement to the lonely residents at our local rest home.  

Next week we look forward to another church friend, who works at our local pregnancy center, coming to talk with us about relationships, purity, and making wise, heart-guarding choices when we're online.  A bit more intense than nail polish and face masks, but SO important!

It's been a great year so far!  I have LOVED watching my 8th grade girls soak up all these fun lessons and act as gracious hostesses themselves to our many guests.  How cool that the ladies of our church, with their many gifts, have been generous enough to come share their time and talents with this group!  They have modeled "true beauty" in a way that I hope my girls remember forever as they grow into young women.

A Cozy Christmas at Home

Appropriately, our 2020 ended with a little self-quarantine at home.  When our other pastor and his family went down days before break started, Dave was really feeling the pressure to stay healthy and make it through all the holiday services.  To ensure he could do his job, we all took one for the team and decided to lay low for Christmas.  And you know what?  It ended up being a very nice Christmas break-- cozy and relaxing and full of fun and family time!

2020 teacher gifts be like...

A couple times we left our house to view some Christmas lights.

We also had coffee drive in dates,

Banket baking lessons, 

And lots of delicious, special food!  We picked up a fancy pie for Christmas day and redeemed a generous gift card to a super fancy restaurant by ordering their family pick up meal.  Right from the comfort of our own home we savored Chef John's truffle risotto, broccolini, Fiscalini mac and cheese, wedge salad, filet mignon and chocolate mousse.  

Ivy got SO much love and spoils!  We'll all moan when we remember 2020, but our dogs will be like, "That was the best year of my life!"

We made our home a warm, cozy place for us to be-- with good smells, good food, fires, games, movies, and comfy clothes every day.

Then there was the joy of Christmas present opening!  Some highlights were the sweatshirts from the girls' favorite YouTuber.  I learned a new word this holiday-- "merch". ;)

When I showed the family that funny "I got a robe!" SNL skit, they hilariously thought it was my way of asking for a robe!  This luxurious, plush robe ended up being my favorite gift!  In fact, we ALL got robes from different people!  2020, the Year of Robes.

The girls loved sweet, hand knit hats from their Auntie Heather.

The big gift was a Nintendo Switch!  I'm not much of a video gamer, but I do love a good family board game, so it was a blast getting some Jackbox games to play together through the Switch.  We'd log on from our different devices and play this together for HOURS, laughing sometimes until we cried.  Jackbox games combine creativity, drawing, writing, and humor and are totally my jam!

We met the goal of making it through the holidays healthy!  So, come New Year's, with school restarting just days later, we were still feeling like being cautious and not taking the risk with our big annual NYE party.  Instead we had just one other church family over-- friends that have stayed in our bubble and who we'd had daily contact with already.  It was a night of more good food and Jackbox games and it was super fun.

Christmas Break ended, as it always does for me, with the writing of tons of thank you notes for all the kind gifts I receive from my students.  Spending the last few days of break intentionally thinking about my kids always gets me ready for the transition from home life to school life.  It's been a great January too!  I have not missed a day of school yet, getting to be there for my students and teach all my favorite winter units myself.  And the girls have been able to finish their first semester strong also, surviving final projects and exams, while staying busy with friends, Robotics, and play practices.   These things are so precious to us now, we were fine with taking a little 2 week break from life to protect our ability to keep doing them. 

Scavenger Hunt!

A while back, Karen gave us a gift certificate to an online scavenger hunt company.  With a cool app on your phone, you can pick a city you want to explore on foot and sign up for one of their specially designed hunts.  There were plenty of good options to choose from-- Fisherman's Wharf in SF, a Capitol tour in Sacramento, a Silicon Valley history hunt in San Jose, even one on Santa Cruz's Boardwalk!  We chose one in Angels Camp-- a little gold mining town in the foothills that is full of fun Mark Twain history.  And we chose to do it on Dave's birthday.

After registering your team on the app, you start the hunt by following clues to various landmarks and sites in the city.  Along the way, you solve puzzles, answer questions with information you glean, and take silly pictures of random things for extra points.  Our hunt took us about an hour and a half and had us walk about a mile around the town.  We saw so much of Angels Camp that we would have totally overlooked if the hunt hadn't prompted us to visit! (First picture assignment was our team at the very start of the hunt.)

 

We found a Mark Twin statue in a park and had to answer questions about it.

We found a marker memorializing the exact spot where the collapse of a mine shaft in 1889 occurred.

We found the "Frog Walk of Fame" (which was our favorite thing to find!) commemorating each frog that has won the Jumping Jubilee this town hosts each May.  We had to take a funny jumping picture by one of the markers.

We actually found a TON of crazy frog stuff, including this disco frog-- John Toadvolta.  This little town stakes its fame on the fact that Samuel Clemens, in debt and recently fired from a job as a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, settled here for a bit hoping to find some gold to pay off his debts and get some direction in his life.  While he was in Angels Camp, he wrote his first hugely successful short story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, thus giving Mark Twain his voice and launching a pretty epic career as a fiction writer.

We found the marker for the original frog that started this town's frog obsession-- Mark Twain's very own Dan'l Webstery, who jumped 0'0" in the 1865 frog jumping contest, because his owner's sneaky competitor stuffed the frog with lead pellets to weigh him down and win a bet (or so his short story goes).

We earned extra points along the way by taking random pictures of us climbing trees, switching shoes, holding our hand up to an X, and finding cowboy hats, the number 7, a crosswalk, a thermometer, a fountain, and beef jerky.

In the end, after visiting bridges, churches, hotels, cemeteries, and parks, we found ourselves so much more knowledgeable about and appreciative of this historic and fun little town!  We talked to nice people along the way who saw us strangely strolling through their neighborhood.  And, mostly, we just enjoyed the family time together on a beautiful cool day working on a shared project.

Happy birthday to our always-driving, up-for-adventures, puzzle-loving, game-crushing, trivia-remembering, awesome Dad and husband!

Thanksgiving 2020

Well, it's after Christmas, probably a good time to write the Thanksgiving post. :)

Our Thanksgiving was lovely, and lowkey, and full of all the best things this year: church, good food, family, fun, and cherishing the gift that is our home.  

Dave's smoked turkey was amazing once again.  This is Ivy's favorite day!

We played lots of games.

And snuggled up to read and watch movies.

We took a Thanksgiving Day drive and let Ella get behind the wheel for the first time since she officially turned 15 and half over Thanksgiving weekend!  She was a natural.  She's working on her online driver's ed currently and will meet with a driving instructor once she passes a test and gets her permit.  Then she'll be getting as much practice in as possible before she goes for her license this summer! I have all the feelings: relief that her driving will save me so many trips and terror about my baby behind the wheel and on the road. 

We decorated our home for Christmas, including hanging the outside lights and, for the first time ever!, buying a FAKE tree! 

We Zoomed with both of our families and loved seeing everyone's faces!

And, following tradition, we shared what we are thankful for.  Dave for his fellow church staff making this crazy year of ministry run as smoothly as possible, Ella for her friends, Delia for her family.  Since I am the author of this blog, I can go into a bit more detail. ;)  I'm thankful this year for the little things that became big things: that our church could keep worshiping, that our family could get away and experience breathtaking creation at both the coast and the mountains, that I could teach these adorable students in person every single day, and even that the leaves on the trees seemed especially lovely this fall.  This year gave me fresh eyes to see the many blessings that we so often take for granted.

I'll tell you about our Christmas soon...maybe around Valentines Day? Haha!

Among Us

One of the fun ways my girls have found to connect with their friends during this strange season is through the video game Among Us.  This is like a murder mystery that you can play remotely.  As your character (a funny looking space guy) moves around "completing tasks", you are in danger of being murdered by the designated "imposter".  You have to figure out, using the clues you have, who is most "sus" and then go to a meeting and eliminate who you think is the murderer.  While I cannot play this game for the hours that my kids can, Dave and I do join in from time to time, just to keep tabs on our kids' interests. ;)

Well, in typical Ella and Delia fashion, they found a way to turn this video game into a night of creative fun!  On Halloween night, they hosted a live Among Us party outside at a friend's house.  They created real tasks to complete, they assigned people to be the imposter, they even told everyone to come in their own version of the space guy's costume.  (Ella went with a paper mache helmet that took DAYS to craft.)  Sometimes I fret about how attached my kids are to their friends via a screen, but then I see that turn into something redemptive and inventive and I feel alright.

Eighteen kids were able to come to the party on Halloween night!  Another awesome thing about this game is that it has merged 3 random friend groups into one: Delia's friends, Ella's friends, and Ella's boyfriend's friends!  And they are all GREAT kids!  What a fun mix! (Sorry for the blurry pic.)

Among Us socks were among the goodies Sinterklaas left in the klompies this year.

 And as I dodged COVID this whole fall, achieving my goal to make it to Christmas Break healthy, though many around me went down, this had me cracking up!  If you know, you know.