2012 year end review in pictures

Lily's 6th birthday.  She wanted a rainbow "Candy Land" theme.. and like usual.. I sort of got carried away with the decorating. 

What I wrote on my hand one day.  I thought if I pretended to be happy it would at least be better for the girls than my being depressed all the time.  I also thought that maybe if I pretended to be happy than I might actually become happier.. didn't really work that way though.  After this I tried to focus more on taking pictures of positive things.

February-- Projects and art is something that doesn't really end at our house.  Notice the crawling baby in the background.  She just learned to do this around this time of the year.

Short trees, fences, buildings.. this is Dallas.  Every time I look between the apartments to that golf course I get sad and think of the song "Don't fence me in"... I can't breath here.  I feel like Alice in Wonderland wishing to get through the looking glass but in my case I never can.

Somehow we find room for the girls to help on occasion in the kitchen to make cookies or something.  Generally, there is a lot of fighting about who gets to stir.

March 6 was Renna's 4th birthday and this is when we got the membership to the Dallas Zoo.  The only place here that I've felt content for a few brief minutes.  On those days when there weren't many people it was a nice escape from the city and apartments and crowds.

March -- When Grace was still taking a morning nap (or was in between enough and would fall asleep in the carrier) it was so relaxing to go to the zoo where the kids would be happy and I could do "nothing" for a while.  It was always too hot of course, but we packed ice bottles and I learned where things were in the zoo enough to know where to go during the warmer parts of the day so we'd stay cool.

April 22nd came Gracie's first birthday.  She only had one tooth at this point and it must have been her sweet tooth because the chocolate was a big hit!

May-- I got to go to a comic convention with Spider-man this month.  We wanted to see Patrick Stewart!

"The line" to get into the convention.  There are way too many people in Dallas..

Projects projects and more projects.  I often.. often wish that we had a different room for school and projects so that we had a place to eat that didn't involve cleaning up all the glue and paint and paper and what-not before setting the table.  Even a little breakfast nook would be fabulous!

My favorite thing to do at the zoo is to feed the Koi fish.  They are so gigantic and so fun to feed!  Also, when they fight over the food and you get splashed it cools you off.  ;)  My Dad came in June and we took him to the zoo one day.  He enjoyed feeding the fish too and the girls liked showing him all their favorite spots.

July-- Youssef and I got to take just Grace to the Dallas Museum for our 8th wedding anniversary.  I really enjoyed the kids area with her and it was amazing to have some time in the afternoon when she fell asleep in her stroller to just be "us"... I forgot how easy just having one is

In July us girls took a plane trip to Washington for a month!  The trip there was exceedingly exhausting for me, but when I got to be in the quiet hills and see the tall trees my soul started to breathe again and I began to recover.

Lily and Renna loved hanging out with their uncle.  Jonathan turned 13 while we were there.

A few weeks after we got back (in August) Youssef's Mom came for a few days.  It was nice getting to see her at least for a little bit this year.

Random playing --The girls were playing baby dolls and Renna was with child.  ;)

The start of our school happened in September.  Trying to be more consistent with the school time, but it's hard with a teething active toddler getting into everything! 

I felt like the only consistent break I can get on occasion is when the girls are at the church we've been going to.  They love the sundayschool there and have made some good friends.  Here, two of my  kids are posing well and the middle one is having issues.  She smiled later when we got to the part of the hallway that had the turtle that she liked.

A moment at the park when a butterfly landed on Grace.  We see a lot of butterflies here even in December!  If there's going to be heat and bugs down here in droves lets focus on the kind we like, right?

"Trunk or Treat" at our church in October and this was our car decorated like fairy land.  I'm not sure if I should do this next year since it was a ton of work!  We'll see.

Beginning of November and our littlest has not only rejected taking her binky anymore she's grown out of the baby bed... so here we are putting the toddler bed frame together.  I painted it black and it looks quite nice and will work for at least a few more years before she has to graduate to a Twin mattress.

Finally in November it was started to look a little more like Autumn and the girls had fun playing in the falling leaves.  Renna helped collect some "sweet gum balls" from the tree just outside of our apartment.

Also in November I started a Christmas lap quilt.  My Gramma Betty passed away earlier this year and she'd hand sewn those lighter colored blocks.  I've had them for several years now and have been wanting to finish them... well, this year seemed like a good time to do this.  Thanksgiving and Christmas were a lot harder for me this year than any I've experienced before, but making new friends and having projects like this helped a little bit.

December came and with it came our traditional cookie cutting and decorating.

I had about 2 days of real excitement this year (in Dallas) when I thought we might be able to move into a little "dream house" .. it was quirky and amazed me how much it fit Youssef's and my personalities (together) .. Youssef said it was like a tree house and it really seemed to be.  On our honey moon I bought him a book of tree houses and we talked about how we'd like to live in a tree house some day.  This house was about as close to that possibility as we'll probably ever come.  But it didn't work out for us to buy it.  Perhaps when Lily is 10 we'll be able to look again.  :{  In the mean time we're doomed to live in apartments with little play room and cranky neighbors. 

Random moment where Grace got into the butter.  See, this would be why I'm always and forever tired and never able to rest.  Lily and Renna are JUST getting to a point where I can trust them to not have any major issues while I'm resting when Grace naps.  But that doesn't work often when I can't do school with the older ones when the little one is awake.  So, school tends to happen during her nap and then I can't seem to get a moment for rest or my own projects.

I was feeling the need for snow this year more than before.  Last Christmas was so depressing all by ourselves here that I wanted to some how make this one better..  Spreading out the fun stuff sort of worked, and making almost 100 paper snowflakes gave me something useful to do. 

The best present this year was snow ON Christmas day.  After all that longing for snow it actually came and we had a white Christmas after all!  When people talk about getting snow on Christmas here they say something like "We've had snow on Christmas before.. when I was 12 I know it snowed on Christmas a little bit.. and hey, it snowed on Christmas a few years ago."  Lets just say that the probability of this happening is very very low.  So, we were super grateful that it snowed on Christmas this year!  Lily might have been even more excited than me.  When we watched "White Christmas" earlier in December she cried at the end because "It's such a beautiful ending with the snow" and the thing she kept saying that she loved about Christmas was "playing in the snow" and her wish came true! 

Lily has grown much taller this past year (she will be 7 January 4th) and now that we've stayed in one church she's been able to make a few good friends.  She loves to do all kinds of  art and craft projects still.  She doesn't like her reading in school, but I'm pleased to see her progressing well in her language arts and math even if she doesn't like doing it!  Her favorite color is blue and she is planning a "Mermaid Barbie" themed birthday party.  She's said how she wants to be a zoo worker when she grows up because she loves animals so much:  Especially all kinds of cats.

Renna likes to make up songs and has her own style and way of doing things.  She's picked up so much in school times from what I've taught Lily that she started to sound out words to spell all on her own!  Renna loves to wear dresses and her new Christmas Tu-tu.  She's still quite dramatic, but I'm pleased to see her helping out more and starting to work together with the family rather than against what we are all trying to do.  She's affectionate and smart and growing into a lovely girl.  She often says out of the blue how much she misses Gramma and her cousin Sophie. 

Grace has gone from just learning to crawl at the beginning of 2012 to racing around and climbing the tall stools and getting into everything as she tries to keep up with her big sisters.  She has developed quite an interest in "The Muppets" of all things, and Kermit seems to be her favorite.  She also loves to read books and go to the zoo to see the animals.  At the beginning of this year she was painfully shy and would cry and run to me when anyone smiled at her, but after the plane trip to Washington in July, she's grown up a lot and while she's still shy she smiles at people now instead of crying! 

Christmas time activities and traditions

I collected a bunch of Christmas books from a library book sale so that we could wrap them up to open one book a day until Christmas.  It's a fun way to mark the days AND get some good reading time in.

 I don't have as many great ideas about what to plan and do for the Christmas season.  I've really lost all that great energy, but here are a few ideas that we've actually kept up with.

And this is how we stacked them up.  We are taking one off the bottom each day so it still stays in the tree-ish shape.  I got the wrapping paper at a dollar store.  Great place for wrapping paper.. just got to check how many yards on the roll.

This isn't a tradition.. it was just funny.  Lily taught her baby sister to stuff something in her shirt, pat her tummy, and say "Ho, ho, ho.."  ;]

Making cut out cookies (gluten free in our case) and this tradition is always a big hit!

Grace got into it though she didn't know she was doing anything other than playing with the flour.

She called it "doe doe".. super cute.

Lily did a bunch!

I can't get away from a snowflake theme this year and I wouldn't want to! 

Renna working on making a snowman cookie.

Leftover candycorn for the nose.

A bit too much sprinkles, but hey.. it's all good.

More cookies.

The one that the girls made specially for me.

Wait.. that's all that we made?  I'm pretty sure the girls ate at least that many while decorating.  Yes, we had at least twice this much!  wooooo look at that sugar high face!

Easy Christmas game.. foam trees from dollar store and round stickers.  Roll dice and add that many poof balls to the tree.  First one to fill the tree wins!

You can play to get the exact number if you want it to be harder depending on the age of the kids.

A tradition in my family was to have a Christmas picture in front of the tree that mom would make these frames for... hers were fabric and mine are folded paper, but you could get dollar store frames or find other ways to display them!

Starting on the left with our First Christmas together in 2004.

I just finished making the frame for this year.... this is our 9th Christmas together...

It's fun to look back at how the kids have changed and grown.  I'll probably have our whole family every three or 4 years or so in the pics and just the kids all the other years (or the kids with their cousins if we get to spend a Christmas with them some day.)  We might include pets or other things as well to change it up.  The ones that work the best I think are like the far right one with the picture taken farther back.  It's neat to see how tall they are compared to each other too.

The many personalities of snow

Our first meal of fondue this year. 

As a third Christmas approaches without snow I unconsciously started decorating for Christmas in ways I hadn't before.  I've never been one to prefer white or blue Christmas tree lights, but this year our tree has LED lights shaped like snowflakes and normal blue lights as well.  I bought extra large snowflake ornaments at the dollar store to add to the tree and window clings that are snowflakes and there are over 50 paper ones hanging from our ceiling!  (I think we should have a hundred!) And our Christmas tree this year is the most beautiful of any we've ever had (in my opinion) which seems funny to me since I only enjoyed the multicolored ones before.  But it's all because I'm longing so much more this year for snow.

Whenever I mention to people here how I wish for snow they nod and shrug and.. well.. just don't get it.  After all, why would someone grieve about the absence of something as silly as snow?  I think they view it more like rain.. like just something falling from the sky that you can't do anything with except to see from your window as you drink tea and read a book.  I realized something though as I thought about the things I love about winter and snow and all the personalities that the snow and winter has.  It's not an activity here.  Sure snow might be pretty here if it comes at all, but what else do you do with it?  Or should I say, what CAN you do with it when "snow" here is a couple flakes that melt as soon as it hits the ground or freezes into ice sooner than you can put your boots on.

So, here are some thoughts that I've been thinking about snow and it's variations.

I've been enjoying the fireplace through Netflix instant shows.

The "snow man making snow" is the perfect packing kind that all my northern friends will recognize because it doesn't last long.  If at 10 in the morning on a Saturday it's the "perfect snow-man making snow" you can't wait until after lunch to make a snow man!  You've got to grab the moment and enjoy the packing snow! That kind of course can melt or freeze or become the powdery kind depending on the temperature..  it's quite different from the powdery "cross-country-skiing snow" that is light and powdery.  But there are other layers (literally) to snow.  The different layers in a foot or two feet of snow is fascinating... the layers that are crispier (that break like a wafer) or fluffier or denser all add a different experience to walking or playing or skiing in it.  Those times when the few feet of snow is so dense and hard that you can walk on it is always fun.  Even when it breaks and your foot goes down so that the snow comes up over your knee (all the powdery stuff underneath the top layer) is always an adventure.  There's a certain way to walk on it so that your foot won't break it.  I can remember that feeling of walking "just so" so that I wouldn't fall through.

The powdery kind doesn't make a sound when you walk in it for the most part, but there's the more frozeny waffery kind that crunches when you walk in it.  The packing kind tends to make a squeaky sound with each step.  I always thought that was fun.  If the only snow you've walked in has a sloppy slushy sound then you have only experience wet sloshy snow that isn't really "snow" anymore.. it's mostly water.

Gracie was amazed when she touched the star at the top.

I miss the challenge of rolling a snowball as large as I can!  I probably didn't get it bigger than 5x5 ft, but still.. that was one heavy ball of snow!  One year I rolled a ball like that and carved a giant face into it.  I miss going out the back door on a cross country skiing trip.  It wasn't the best place to go, but driving to a friends house to ski worked well too.  I was always the out-of-shape one that struggled in the back, but I was also a bit slower because I kept wanting to stop and look at the scenery.  One time when I got to go down hill skiing at night (I didn't go down hill skiing much) on a ski mountain nearish where we lived (49 for those of you who know what I'm talking about) it was super foggy at the bottom of the mountain where the lodge was, but about halfway up the ski lift you were out of the fog.  The largest shiniest full moon I'd ever seen hovered above the mountain and the deep blue peeks of the mountains all around reached out of the sea of fog like magical islands.  I was transfixed and didn't want to stop looking at the moon and the stars and magical land stretching out in the glowing silvery midnight.  The people working the ski lift wouldn't let me just sit in the snow at the top and look around though so I scooched sideways on my skis about half way down the mountain before having to ski like normal and enter the thick fog.

The most profound times in my life when everything seemed to stand still and clarity and beauty and the wonder of God's creation have happened the most for me were when I was in the snow.  Perhaps that's because it's so quiet.  Not only does it have a personality it has a sound that sounds quieter than quiet.  The sound isn't a sound so much as a muffling of everything else.  As an introvert I crave silence... I had no idea how deep this need went until we moved into a large city on the busiest street by a busy highway surrounded by rows and rows of apartments.  Could we have picked a louder busier more difficult place for me to cope?  Anyway, I miss looking forward to the quietness of snow.

My favorite spot in our house now.

When I was about 11 there was a super long hard winter that year.  You know, the kind you always compare all the other ones to?  Well, this one had four feet of snow on the ground at one time.  Boy that was fun when we jumped off the roofs into it!  Every year after that we'd say, "We only got 2 ft this year, remember before when we had 4 ft?"  (Note, for people who aren't from the north.. when we say we had so many ft of snow it's not the total accumulation over the whole winter.. we just mean how much we had at one time on the ground during the winter.)  There was a moment after jumping off a roof and went up to my waste without touching the ground, that I laid in the snow (a bit hot from playing) and the sun was out sparkling on the snow.  It was like laying in a sea of diamonds except that they were soft as the tiniest feathers.  I looked closer at the frozen snow and could see each tiny flake in perfect detail.  It was so cold that year that the snow didn't melt before freezing.  Each flake landed and piled on top of each other in all the perfection of how they were formed in the clouds.  Time stood still and I felt like I never wanted to leave that comfortable bed of sparkles and wonder.  When the Bible tells us that our sins are made whiter than snow through Jesus' death and resurrection and you are actually looking at the snow glittering in the sun and nearly blinded by the whiteness of it, the profound truth of the gospel is illustrated in an amazing way.  How could the dirty stain of our moldy sins be made to be whiter than that?  It's amazing and true and only God could do that in his creation and inside of us.  These are the things I thought about as I hovered in that moment of wonder.

I call this "snow withdrawal therapy"...

Many a cross-country skiing trip has been the same... with those moments of wonder and looking beyond the tips of my skis to the mountains and snowfall, the majesty and the detail, large and small of what God designed.  I would soak in the quiet and breathe in the cold air and the fog clouding my mind would lift.

I wish I could have spent more time in the snow (in recent years) when we lived in the NorthWest.  For three winters I was pregnant and it made maneuvering in the snow a bit difficult and skiing was out of course at that point.  Then each following year my energy level hadn't recovered enough to do a ton in the snow either, but oh that third year!  Well, I'm at the third Christmas now, pregnant the first year we were here, then recovering from giving birth the second year, and now here I am ready to go and race in the snow with my girls!  Ready for the many personalities of the snow.. to play in and to shovel it and to ski in.  The wonder of waking up to quieter than quiet falling and a blanket of beauty transforming the brown world with sparkles.

The girls were pretending that it was snowing.

I wonder how someone would feel if they looked forward to spring flowers and knew they wouldn't see the bounty they were used to (if any) or someone who is really into a sport and is in a land where that sports season is non-existent or terribly undervalued and not understood.  What is it that you long for each year and crave and celebrate in your own way?  I've always felt this way about snow.  The people who are indigenous to this area tend to act like this, "Snow?  Oh we had that one year.. okay, moving on." Sorry people... I can't move on and not care about it so quickly.  I know you don't get it and how could you?  How could you understand why I would grieve for the absence of something that I'd looked forward to all my life when you've never truly experienced it as I have or looked forward to it in the same way?  How could you miss a dear friend of mine when they are just a stranger to you?  -Someone you've seen perhaps, but not someone you know personally.

It wasn't quiet cold enough for a fire, but we had the sliding door open so we could roast marshmallows inside and make some smores for the first time!  Generally when it does get cold enough it takes me too long to realize it and by then it's hot again.

Check out that smore! 

Maybe you've had a bad skiing experience like my husband did on snow that wasn't right.. aka-frozen hard stuff that you can't do anything with (yeah that's called ice not snow) and don't truly know or see it's many personalities.  Or perhaps you are in a snowy area and are bogged down with the amount of shoveling or driving in it, please stop for a moment and look at it as you did when you were a child.. full of wonder and amazement.  There are those of us who would much rather have the cold and snow (shoveling and all!) if we could only experience all the aspects and flavors of a snowy winter again.

Or perhaps you are like me and far from home and the things you grew up longing for and anticipating and celebrating look different now.  Perhaps you have to come up with new ways to celebrate and you have to learn how to deal with losses that the people around you can't empathize with... It will be okay.. you won't be this sad forever and in the mean time keep looking for ways to enjoy what you have as much as you can.  Sometimes we have to lose something before we can truly appreciate or know what's truly important to us.

In case you are needing some snow therapy here are some pattern ideas to start with.  From this site. 
But first you've got to know how to fold the paper!