Christmas joy

We had an absolutely wonderful Christmas! Usually on Christmas morning I have a set agenda; we open stockings, eat breakfast (which is usually a cinnamon roll cake with a candle and we sing Happy Birthday to Jesus), then we read the Christmas story and finally attack the presents.

This year, however, things are a little different around here. So I let go of my agenda and let the kids run the day. It was wonderful!

We headed downstairs all together and the kids were thrilled to see what Santa had left them; Eli got a Francesco (from Cars 2) Lego set that he's been wanting for months, and Abby got a ballerina doll. They were both elated! And that was before they saw the stockings overflowing with treats and toys.  

 Eli and Abby had gotten each other special Christmas gifts as well. Abby was thrilled when she opened the princess Eli picked out for her.

 And Eli was equally excited by the Cars 2 lego set Abby chose for him.

 Another tradition in our little family is that Ryan and I take the kids out shopping seperately so that they can choose gifts for us. This was the first year that Eli was old enough to really get into (in the past he has chosen things that he wanted, like Hot Wheels cars or candy, as gifts for us). This year when Ryan asked him what he wanted to get me for Christmas, Eli surprised Ryan by saying "I want to get Mama a hat because she lost her hair." My precious boy has such a sweet heart! Needless to say, the purple hat he selected was definitely one of my favorite gifts this year!

 We spent quite a long time opening presents...were are very blessed by generous, loving family members.

 I was pretty excited about this shirt I got for Ryan...

 Abby ended up getting three new dolls, and had a wonderful time playing with them all day.

  

We had a wonderful and relaxing morning celebrating the birth of Jesus! We had planned to go to Ryan's parents' house for dinner, but after they returned home from church to discover their power out they packed up all the food and came here to cook! Thanks for a great Christmas dinner, Mom and Dad!

We hope everyone had as wonderful and blessed a Christmas as we did! 

Merry Christmas!

This year's Christmas card and letter:

Christmas 2011

Dear Family and Friends,

As always, we hope this letter finds you and your loved ones well and enjoying a blessed year and Christmas season.

What a year it has been for our little family! We went into 2011 anticipating change, but we truly had no idea what God had in store for us! In January we began preparations for putting our house in Sammamish up for sale. We were feeling led to move out of the area, and Ryan began applying for jobs in Boise and Austin. In April we moved into the home of some friends who were out of the country for a few months and officially put our house on the market. We were truly blessed by a fairly quick sale, but still had no idea where we were headed.

While we waited for God’s direction we continued with our activities here. Abby began taking dance classes in April and has continued to love this activity. She just had her first recital and it was adorable! Eli has continued to enjoy sports programs through the local Parks & Rec, most recently completing eight weeks of swimming classes that have been great for him.

In June, God provided an amazing job for Ryan that we never expected; he was hired as the Athletic Director at Skyline High School in Sammamish and started immediately. Skyline is the local athletic powerhouse, and in his first season there Ryan saw three of his teams win state titles. The job has been a tremendous blessing to us and Ryan loves it. Some days he is still in awe of the fact that his career is high school sports!

In August we found a wonderful little house to rent in an amazing neighborhood in the Issaquah Highlands. The Highlands had everything we were looking for; a fantastic community filled with young families and a great elementary school within walking distance. We love our new home; it is smaller (and thus easier to maintain) and brighter than our previous house, and we have a great landlady. Eli started Kindergarten three weeks after we moved in, and this has really helped us (especially Cheryl and Eli) connect with our neighbors. We’ve made some really good friends very quickly.

Eli is thriving in half-day Kindergarten. He loves school, loves to learn, and his reading skills have exploded! His favorite parts of school are recess and P.E.; he is his daddy’s son!  Abby and Mama have enjoyed the one-on-one time while Eli is in school and joined a great playgroup that meets Wednesdays here in our neighborhood.

Despite two moves, a new job that kept Ryan incredibly busy for the first three months, and Eli starting school, our biggest change came on November 3rd when Cheryl was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a painful and scary shock, but is tempered by the fact that we know this is part of God’s plan for our lives and that He is totally in control. At 33, Cheryl is considered very young for this diagnosis, and that fact combined with the spread of the cancer to two lymph nodes led to an aggressive treatment plan. Cheryl has undergone two of six chemotherapy treatments which will be followed by a mastectomy and then radiation. God has provided an incredible medical team at Evergreen Hospital, and we continue to be impressed by the level of care Cheryl is receiving. This is absolutely the most difficult thing we’ve ever gone through, but we have been positively overwhelmed by the incredible support that we have. Prayer, meals, childcare, house cleaning, and much more have been provided since the day of diagnosis, and we are so very grateful for it all. We are blessed and humbled by the number of people that God has provided to support and care for us through this trial.

We are amazed and grateful at the many ways that God has prepared us for this and provided for our care. We are grateful that He provided an amazing job for Ryan here, where we have so much support, instead of leading us to move. We are grateful that Ryan’s job is not only one that he loves, but also one that has given him great flexibility in caring for and being with Cheryl as we battle her cancer. We are grateful that God provided a small, easy to maintain house that is a bright and comfortable place for Cheryl to recover. We are grateful for the incredible support community that God has put in place to care for us in so many ways. We are grateful for the talented and caring medical team that He directly led us to. We are grateful that Abby and Eli are too young to be scared, but old enough to be impacted by the outpouring of love and support that God is providing from our community. Most of all, we are grateful that God is in control, that His plan is perfect, and that even when we don’t see the wisdom of His plan or don’t like it, He promises to never leave or forsake us.

If you’d like to receive updates on Cheryl’s treatment, you can sign up at https://www.lotsahelpinghands.com/c/649361/login/. Cheryl continues to blog about Eli and Abby at http://theeliandabbyshow.blogspot.com/ as much as she is able.

In January Eli will play soccer, and Abby will progress to the next level in her dancing. Eli will have a new Kindergarten teacher, as his original teacher will be out on maternity leave for the remainder of the school year. Abby will begin attending preschool on a very part-time basis at a wonderful play-based preschool run by a friend of ours from church. Ryan will be hard at work during the winter sports season, particularly with basketball, for which he is the KingCo 4A league commissioner for both boys and girls. Cheryl, of course, will be hard at work fighting cancer!

We wish you all the joy of this blessed season during which we celebrate the birth of Jesus. Without Him, this year and this season of our lives would be not just more difficult, but seemingly impossible. We trust God’s sovereignty and know that His plan for us is perfect. We know that He loves and treasures us, and that He is using this for our good and His glory. Our God is good and holy, and gives us hope to sustain us through these trials. We’d love to talk to you about Him if you ever have that desire.

We’d love to hear how you’re doing as well. Please keep in touch!

With much love and Christmas blessings,
Ryan, Cheryl, Eli (5 ½), and Abby (2 ½), oh, and our Zoe dog, too! (almost 8)

So much fun

Since I did all of my Christmas shopping online this year, we have tons of boxes around. Yesterday the kids comandeered a couple of them and I cannot even describe how much fun they had!

 Today the boxes became go carts and Eli & Abby took turns pushing each other across the living room. Kinda makes me wonder about the wisdom of spending money on all the stuff that came in those boxes! ;)

Gingerbread Houses

The other day while I was resting, Ryan and the kids decided to make gingerbread houses. Lucky for me I woke up when they got back from the store with the "building materials" so I didn't miss out on the fun. They had such a great time creating their masterpieces!

Here's Eli's finished "worm house"

And the best part; the eating!

Abby's finished house:

And quite the mouthful!

My two favorite boys, both very proud of their work!

 Ha! Love that guy! We are so blessed to have such an amazing husband and daddy! :)

Christmas crafts

 Ryan put up our Christmas tree on Thanksgiving this year, and it has been a great morale-booster and source of joy in our house for the past month. However, trying to find all of our boxes of Christmas decorations that are buried in the garage, decorate, and then get everything put away afterward seemed like too daunting a task this year with all that we've got going on. So this year we decided to have a hand-made Christmas; aside from the lights, everything on our tree this year has been made or decorated by our kids in the past couple of weeks...and it looks awesome! Eli and Abby have had a great time with all of the craft projects. They made beaded candy cane ornaments...

And jeweled letter ornaments...

They've also made paper chains, jeweled Christmas trees, and several others that I missed getting pictures of. Eli and Abby both love crafts, so this has all been great fun for them. We are so very grateful to all of the wonderful friends who have brought over these fantastic projects for the kids! Thank you all so much for helping make our Christmas special!

Snowflake Lane

For some reason all of my photos from Snowflake Lane this year didn't turn out (I think I had the camera on some funky setting), but fortuately the event itself was great fun! This is a local event that we made a family tradition last year, but this year the kids were way more into it. They had a great time listening to the music, seeing the characters, and trying to catch "snowflakes" (the fake snow shower is made of bubbles, and really adds to the magic of the evening!).

First recital

Our little ballerina just had her first dance recital with Emerald City Dance. Abby loves dancing and does it constantly, and absolutely adores her dance class and her teacher. She thought it was pretty great that she actually got to be in a real recital! It was held at a nearby elementary school, and we could not believe how packed the place was! I'm pretty sure everyone in the greater Issaquah area with a daughter or granddaughter between the ages of 2-10 was crowded into the tiny school multi-purpose room!

Abby was so excited as we waited in the hallway for her turn to perform with her class.

Being the youngest, her class went first, performing a simple routine to the "Rubber Ducky" song from Sesame Street. It was very cute!

We had fun cheering her on, and she did great despite being very distracted by the classmate next to her who sobbed through the whole thing!

Classes aren't in session right now, but when they resume in January Abby will move up to the next class level, from "Teeny Emeralds" to "Mini Emeralds." Oh, the cuteness! :)

Great Wolf Lodge

We had an absolutely amazing weekend at Great Wolf Lodge early in November. It was such a blessed weekend for the four of us to just get away and enjoy time together as a family before my treatment started, and we have some truly amazing friends to thank for the whole thing!

We checked in just after 1:30, and the kids got to color these cute posters while we waited. It didn't take Abby any time at all to get comfy when we got into our room. But she didn't relax for long; we changed right away and headed to the indoor water park! GWL is most famous for its amazing indoor water park, featuring tons of slides, a dedicated toddler area (with slides!), a wave pool, and most important - warm water! :) All four of us had a complete blast in the water park! Unfortunately I have no photos because we were way too busy having fun to take pictures! :) It was seriously such a blast!

Next, it was off to dinner. The resort has several dining options, and we chose the restaurant where you get to eat in tents (well, kind of...the booths are covered with canopies). It was really cute, and the best part was that the kids meals came with wolf ears and tails!After dinner it was time for MagiQuest...this cool interactive game in which the kids use a computerized wand to help them find different clue/treasure stations throughout the hotel. Abby was a little young to understand what we were doing, but Eli was really into it!Finally, it was time for the pajama story time by the fireplace! Eli was mesmerized, but as soon as the mechanical animals started singing, Abby freaked out! She and I went for a walk while Eli watched the rest of the show. We had a nice, relaxing morning in our room, including breakfast that our friends had packed us! Here are our little wolves howling!Abby relaxing with her new squirrel friend...from a Build-a-Bear-type animal stuffing station at the resort (Eli's souveneir was a GWL pillowcase that he colored himself).After hitting the water park for a few more hours and doing a couple more MagiQuest adventures, we were all blissfully exhausted and ready to head home.

It was a wonderful weekend!!

Family portraits

This beautiful post is long-overdue! Back in October, my talented friend Kate launched her own photography business. We were excited to be one of her first clients, so we had her take some amazing new family portraits!

Needless to say, she did amazing work, and we love these new portraits! Aren't the fall colors amazing? You'd never know that it was wet and freezing that morning! ;)