Monday, December 22, 2014

We have had a wonderful few days! Friday morning Jeremy and I had our meeting with Chloe's speech teacher and she is improving by leaps and bounds. Starting in January she will be starting to work on her 'r's', but she is doing so well that they are going to cut her back to 30 minutes a week of speech therapy. After her meeting Jeremy had to head to work, but I stayed to join Samuel's class for breakfast and book reports. It was a little bit of a madhouse, but I enjoyed sharing this precious time with Samuel. I love watching him interact with his friends at school and my heart swells with pride for the young man he is becoming. After his breakfast I headed home for a few hours to get some things done and then headed back to school to help Chloe with her party. Her teacher once again noted how much she has changed since that meeting we had with all of the support staff. I said we had been laying hands on her and praying for her. The teacher lit up and hugged me :). At 3:30, I had three extremely happy children! Jeremy and I decided that we would surprise the kids and let them open their presents from us on Friday night. Part of our decision was based on the fact that at 4:30 I was already hearing, "mom, I am bored". They loved their gifts and I got some pretty good gifts too. I have been wearing a Fitbit since August. I got my Fitbit on sale so I did not have many color choices. Jeremy got me a set of three Fitbit bands that I can change and I love the colors. He also surprised me with a book that I had been wanting to read, but never said anything about it. I like the movie The Princess Bride and I am usually fascinated by the back story of things. He got me the book As You Wish written by the leading man of the movie, Cary Elwes. The book is very interesting so far, but I get tickled because I am totally reading the book with the author's voice as Westley (main character) in my mind.

Saturday we headed to my parents to have Christmas with them. My brother's family came to have Christmas so we had so much fun! This is one of my nephew's first Christmas, so that is always fun. Gio will be one in just a few weeks and he is at one of my favorite stages. He claps and laughs, he crawls and is fascinated at the lights and gifts, and my very favorite, he reaches for people when he wants them to hold him. There is something wonderful that happens when a baby reaches for you to hold them! The kids (and us) got lots of nice gifts. We came got back home around 9;30 and we were thankful that we were able to find a parking space on our street. We had quite a bit of things to carry inside and there have been times we had to park several blocks away at that time of night.

One perk of having church at home and with a small group you can change your service times around if you need to. Jeremy and Samuel had tickets to the Bears game yesterday and our other family is from MI and they also had tickets for the game. We had service earlier and then the boys headed to the game. The girls and I went out for lunch and had to get a few things for our trip. It was a really good day!

Today is filled with baking treats for this week, cleaning up the house, packing, and getting some laundry done.