Finally an update!!

Time has gone on and on and on....you get the idea. I apologize for the lack of updating. It seems that life gets busy and my time just gets whittled down to very little but I need to be sure to make the time to update here for all of you who check my blog regularly :)

The "holiday season" has started and there are so many engagements and appointments and "lasts of the year" coming around to look forward to. We spent Thanksgiving with others in the Glacierview community. What we do is prepare our Thanksgiving meal for our families and then all gather together and share our meals potluck style. It's so much fun for those of us who don't have any other family nearby! The kids were so excited as well to get to eat foods that I don't usually cook like pistachio jello and sourcream and mandarin orange jello salad. We ended our fun day with a sledding party down Ranch Camp Road (technically Lee Drive) It was subzero outside but that never stops the kids age 5 up to 18 and even occasionally adults (I, Rachel, went down one time haha) from enjoying the thrill of sliding down the long, steep, curvy road and then being pulled up behind a truck on ropes while sitting on their sleds.

I, along with another lady in our church have organized a Christmas play for the kids in our church and Awana program this year. It is called "And the Angels Watched" Naomi is Angel 4 and Isabella is the littlest Angel. They are very excited and have been working hard on memorizing their parts. All of the children are angels and those without speaking parts are still on stage as part of the Angel choir. They are all working hard and are very excited to be a part of a Christmas play. Our community hasn't done a Christmas play for quite a few years.



Ryan finally got his caribou rack and skull cleaned and hung up. I guess it's called a "European skull mount". It was so funny the night he hung it up. I guess Brutus (our dog) woke up in the middle of the night and was startled by it because he would not stop barking at the thing. Can't vouch much for his brain activity lol.

The kids were so excited to decorate for Christmas on the day after Thanksgiving. They helped to set up the tree and advised where they would put different decorations. It's so fun to watch kids get so excited about things.





I think as adults we celebrate Christ's birth and that in itself is so special but kids just seem to have an extra dose of excitement and wonder and excitement at all of it! This year seems to have stirred a lot of questions for the two younger kids regarding Jesus, and heaven and hell and what it means to be forgiven and implications of their actions in the big picture of life. I really enjoy these conversations with them.



I am working on some Jazz piano pieces to try to play along with the school/community band for this year's school/community concert on the 14th. Struggling through them might be more accurate. The pieces are Big Band Holiday and Baby It's Cold Outside. I think between millions of sharps and flats the timing is the most difficult thing to get down. It is fun though to have some challenging piano to work on.





Winter is in full force here in the Talkeetna Mountains of Alaska. We have been ice skating on the lake for about a month now. Naomi and Natalie are really developing some great skills on ice skates.







We've done a little snow machining as well but the temps have been unseasonably cold so far for most of the winter and we are waiting for some 10's and 20's in order to make it a little less painful and a little more fun :) Today we are getting quite a bit of snow and the temp outside is about 15 so we are in the middle of quite the warm up! Hopefully it lasts for awhile. The subzero temps don't usually come around until January/February so maybe we will have gotten it out of the way early.





Well that is all the catching up I have for now.