Cutest moment

I experienced the cutest moment this morning when coming down the stairs. Normally, the boys get up before us and go down stairs where at some point a fight will break out over who had which toy first. This morning i came down the stairs and saw this:

To be clear, Stoney is reading a book to Monty. Despite the fighting, it seems to me that these two brothers love each other.

Christmas

Well, it has come and gone.
We went to see the lights in the city and the nativity by the city hall. The figures in the nativity are statues, the sheep on the other hand, are real.




We made some Gingerbread houses, which actually were made of sugar cookies, because i couldn't find the ingredients for real gingerbread over here. I must say that i had no idea how much work it was to make Gingerbread houses from scratch.



Note how there is a little lego man climbing the roof apparently assisting in the construction of the ginger bread house.

Stoney 's eight birthday

Stoney turned eight today. It is frighting how quick time flies. Man I love that little boy.
Here are the standard Birthday pictures.





Stoney with my mom...

It was also still a great day to be out in the snow. The snow we got earlier last week was to dry to make snowmen, but today Stoney finally got to make his.

First there was one...
Then we had two...

Then there were three
And eventually we had an entire family of snowmen...

ward Christmas party

We had our ward Christmas party on Friday and the boys played in a little nativity play/little drummer boy act.
Stoney was one of the three kings and Monty was a shepherd.





And here is a picture of Leland at the end of the Christmas party.

Snow

We got a snow storm! Yeah! Call me crazy but i just love snow. Love to see it fall, love to walk in it, love to see the world being covered in the white blanket.





Of course, it being Belgium, the schools don't close for anything. Not even a delayed opening despite the six inches of snow this morning. Stoney rode his bike to school anyway. (Monty was sick and stayed home)

Sinterklaas

First of: our computer resurrected. Well, sort of. We had to buy a new hard drive, but that was still cheaper then buying a whole new computer. A friend of Leland was good enough to fix the whole thing. He had to take the entire computer apart, but in the end, it is now up and running again. Yeah!

As every year, we celebrated Sinterklaas day in the beginning of December. Sinterklaas (saint Nicolas) is a cousin of Santa we tell the kids and he comes on December fifth or sixth (depending if you are in Belgium or in the Netherlands)
Since Sinterklaas is a total separate holiday from Christmas, there is no Christmas tree yet and no tree to put the presents under. Usually some bags of presents just 'magically' turn up outside the front door in the traditional Sinterklaas bags.

We celebrated this year's Sinterklaas with Oma and Opa and of course the boys got spoiled again. Little did they know that Sinterklaas got some help from people in the ward.


Monty got a much needed bike helmet.

One of the great presents they got was a little table hockey/billiards/football game.
It's great fun, but they get frustrated because Daddy plays to well. (he probably should let them win sometimes...)

what can I say...?

I haven’t been blogging lately because our computer died… It is still dead to be exact. We got a virus, which turned out to be a rather nasty one. Not just a virus but a ‘worm’. And not just one ‘worm’, three ‘worms’ There are also 17 execute files on the computer, whatever all that means. In my day to day language it just means: the computer is toast.

We are borrowing a tiny little notebook of friends from church for the time being, but we are looking at something more permanent. Of course a new compute costs money, which we do not have. Sometimes it seems that life just never changes.

Leland still doesn’t have a job, but is following Dutch class four days out of the week. We are praying and praying and praying that he will get a job soon. It’s been a year and a half. Enough with the trial already.

More ordinary day to day news: Monty has the stomach flu (that is, we hope it is just the stomach flu and nothing more serious like the Mexican flu or something) and of course, Monty being Monty, he milks it for all that it’s worth. He is so melodramatic. This morning he said: “I have had a stomach pain for years and years and years….”

Whatever kid. Just go take a nap.