Christmas Story

This year, Justin read part of the Christmas story each night after dinner. He added on every day, so Gracie heard it 25 days in a row. Pretty amazing what she can pick up from hearing things over and over again! We need to do stuff like this more often.

A White Christmas!

We woke up to snow on Christmas morning! This is my (Jamie) first white Christmas. We enjoyed it since we know we won't have Christmases like this in Africa!

Anna learned to crawl on Christmas! I guess all the toys and wrapping paper gave her good motivation.

Christmas Eve

This was our breakfast treat on Christmas Eve. Called "pain au chocolate" it's basically a croissant with chocolate rolled up inside it. It's delicious!

Christmas Eve breakfast! It was even snowing outside.

We did our Bible story and Gracie put the second to last figure up on our Advent calendar. Tomorrow morning is Baby Jesus!

The girls were having fun after dinner - Gracie spinning Anna in her booster chair.

Christmas Petting Zoo

Wednesday afternoon we went downtown to see the petting zoo that is set up. They have chickens, goats, geese, sheep, a donkey, a dog, etc. Very different but very fun for Gracie!

Baby chicks!

Gracie loved the animals

Daddy stayed outside with Anna

French Jingle Bells

Last Friday at our school's Christmas party, the students sang an international version of Jingle Bells. The majority of the video is sung in French!

Gracie loves to listen to this song...she calls it the "Ding Ding Dong Song"

Christmas Party

We had a Christmas Party Tuesday evening at our apartment. Everyone brought something to share and we ate very well! There were 8 kids and a baby, so every toy we have was somewhere on the floor, but the kids all had fun!

Christmas cookies and hot cider...our favorite!
This is an ice cream cake called a " buche" here in France. EVERYONE has this for Christmas, so one of our guests made it, and it was great! But oh how we would love a bowl of peppermint ice cream right now!


This is what the inside looks like.

Clean up time!

You Know You Live In France When . . .

. . . your daughter builds a "chateau" instead of a castle!

School Christmas Party

We had a Christmas party at school today! As you can see our school is very international. We love it!

We sang Christmas songs in many different languages.

These are our teachers (minus two).
Notice the boots. All the women here wear boots!

The kids got a special gift.

Oh, and it is snowing again today! Christmas is in the air.

Anna has long enough hair for a pony tail now!

And she has a new obsession: sucking on the rug. Sigh.

9 Months Old

At 9 months old Anna loves to clap, scoot around on the floor and play with her big sister! We sure love our sweet girl. She seems to be growing up so fast!

Bad Hair Day

Play Play

Gracie loves playing with her blocks . . .

. . . and making Anna a Super Sluth.

A New Rug!

Jamie went out and got a new rug for our living room - a wonderful early Christmas present! The girls are loving having space to play on without having to be on the cold tile floor, and we're loving not having to spread a blanket on the floor each time we put Anna down!

Anna loves her new play space, and is already inch-worming around. She'll be crawling in no time now.

Feeling Better

We all had the flu this week, so we are thankful to be feeling better!

Gracie and Daddy went outside to play in all the snow. Gracie, however, felt out-of-control in the snow and just wanted to be carried most of the time!

Gracie's new purple boots have come in handy this week.

Gracie's first candy cane of the season!

We went downtown to see the Christmas decorations on Saturday. Among other things we saw the horse-drawn carriage.

It was more difficult than we anticipated manuevering the stroller through the snowy sidewalks. We ended up taking the bus home.

Gracie found a new place to play!

Since we haven't been able to get a rug yet, we sometimes lower the futon and let Anna play on it. She's much happier here than on the floor! (just have to watch her closely to make sure she doesn't roll off)

Gracie's drinking "little spicy" (what she calls Coke) that was left over from Mommy's birthday last week