November 30th Update

Grady takes in his first hockey game and watches his Uncle Isaac play. I told Grady to take notes!!

The girls helped bake and decorate their own fall cupcakes!

The quality of light around 3pm. The sun no longer makes it over the ridge. We'll see it again around February! :(

Norah loves school too when she can help Evie with projects. The volcano before...

And after!

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! Ours was a little interesting due to having the stomach flu visit our house the day before Thanksgiving.We'd had a plan set in place with some good friends and so of course that didn't work out. Our poor little girls were not in good shape so we spent Wednesday cleaning up messes and watching cartoons and on Thursday we slept in and had Thanksgiving dinner at our leisure  (well, Justin and I did...the girls' appetites weren't up to par). All in all, though it would have been more fun to celebrate with friends or family, it was a relaxing day and we enjoyed the company of our kiddos and were able to focus on our many blessings without the worthy distractions of traveling, cleaning house, or being busy!
Victory's high school retreat was cancelled last weekend due to some pretty awful weather. If you live in AK, you know what I'm talking about! When roads close in Alaska due to weather, you know it's bad. Anchorage, Palmer and Wasilla received freezing rain which turned cars to ice cubes and roads to skating rinks. We didn't get much warmer than 13 degrees here at camp, but we got some wind and blowing snow that caused a power outage that lasted about 36 hours. That was a bit of a challenge with 3 kids, being the longest outage I've experienced since living up here. (We have frequent power outages but they usually only last a couple of hours.) We were thankful to have lots of candles and flashlights, a gas range rather than an electric one, and a woodstove! We ended up putting the contents of our refrigerator and deep freeze into coolers on the back porch. Did you know that you can freeze eggs and then thaw and use them again? I didn't either, but now I do. :)
We are looking at December now and the girls are awfully excited about Christmas. Last year we started what seems to be becoming a family tradition of making an advent calendar with a fun Christmas activity to count down every day till Christmas. It especially helps Evie because she can see the time pass in a more understandable way (versus Norah who is still at the age of being excited but not completely sure why).
We hope your holiday season is great and that you don't let the happy chaos of the next month or so overshadow the TRUE reason for the joy that we can have! I will be telling myself that often enough in the next few weeks. :)