Holiday update

The kids and I had an interesting Thanksgiving week this year. I have already posted that we went down South because my dad was sick. Well, we left the Great White (although not yet) North on Wednesday and my dad had surgery on Friday evening. He had part of his colon removed because of diverticulitis. I spent some time Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening in the hospital with Dad while Mom went home to rest. Dad was able to come home Wednesday afternoon and is recovering very nicely.

The kids spent most of their time swimming! My parents have a swimming pool and the kids had a blast since we don't swim much in the winter - there are indoor pools up here, but we frequent them rarely. We visited Dad several times, which seemed to cheer him up a good bit. On the first Friday we were there, we visited a nature center and learned about sea animals and "hammocks" (a certain kind of forest-type of thing). I meant to take them to another nature center with owl exhibits (for Ga'Hoole Girl) and to the science museum, but they wanted to swim most of the time, so I didn't argue.

The kids and I made a nice dinner for Thanksgiving, although Dad was only able to have broth, pudding, and Jello. Friday, though, the kids and Mom put up Christmas decorations. Ga'Hoole Girl and Wild Man were excited out of their minds! Unfortunately, I had a migraine on Friday, so I just laid low most of the day.

I have never been a big fan of air travel, but I must admit that my actual fear of flying seems to have pretty much gone away. I think our trip to Venezuela a few years ago pretty well took care of it. I was a little concerned about traveling by myself with kids, especially since our flights were booked so late and I had no guarantee about seating arrangements. But, all worked out well. The kids are both pretty comfortable with air travel these days. They each had a backpack with everything that they would need for the flight. For one of the flights, I was 20 rows away, but they did just fine.

Overall, I'm glad that we went on this trip. I think we were helpful for my parents and the kids and I enjoyed each other's company. Now we're going to be doing lots of Christmas crafts and getting our own house decorated for Christmas.

I was planning to do a big Christmas unit this month, but I'm going to have an interesting time of it. I have a bunch of movies from Netflix for us to watch, but the books that I want from the library are all taken already - I think other families are wanting to do the same thing. There is lots of info on the Internet, so that may be our primary source of information. We're going to get back to our workbook work tomorrow and I'm going to have them each keep a notebook for the month. I think we'll start this week with the Nativity story itself.

I read several books and we watched lots of movies, so reviews will be forthcoming!