My Crazy Life as a Farmers Wife: Family

January 17, 2013

Kauai 2012: Part I

As I mentioned previously, our family had the wonderful opportunity of spending our Christmas holiday on the beautiful island of Kauai (our favorite Hawaiian Island). This trip was different than our previous trips to Kauai though...we just so happened to travel with 34 people! The whole Christensen clan traveled to Kauai to celebrate my in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary. It was a wonderful occasion filled with plenty of family, fun, sun and sand. As per usual, I took MANY photos, so it will take me a few posts to get them all up.

Posted at 10:04 AM in Family, Grace, Kate, Lily, Russell, Shelby, trips | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 12, 2013

Christmas Festivities

We spent our Christmas holiday in Kauai, Hawaii this year with the entire Christensen clan to celebrate David's parents 50th Anniversary. It was a wonderful occasion, and I enjoyed every minute of it! I am, however, still playing catch up here at home (actually, it feels that I sometimes spend my whole life trying to play catch up. Is there really such a thing as being "caught up" or is it just a myth?). We did enjoy some of our traditional family Christmas events before we left for our vacation on December 20th (posts about Kauai to come soon!).

We attended the annual Russell Family Christmas breakfast and enjoyed the company of our Russell relatives and a delicious breakfast followed by a little music and singing...

After the family breakfast, Grace had her Christmas violin recital...

Because we were gone for Christmas, we had our own little family Christmas party before we left. We explained to the kids that because of our trip, they would only get a few little things for Christmas. We made a delicious dinner and let the kids open those presents before we left for Hawaii...

And we went to my parents for a pizza party and gift exchange...

Posted at 09:33 AM in Christmas, Family, Fiddling, Grace, Kate, Lily, Russell | Permalink | Comments (6)

December 14, 2012

'Tis the Season!

It's that busy time of year again! The holiday season is full of so many activities and events...and we are also trying to finish up our homeschool semester. It seems like we have crammed so much into each and every day!

Our family band played a few Christmas tunes at my parent's church Christmas party

The girls even got to see Santa!

We've been busy working around the house and outdoors...David and the kids cleaned out the chicken coop

Grace gets the fun job! She gets to clean all the leftover straw and poop out of the nesting boxes

Kate and Lily created life-sized elf drawings

We finished up a first grade science unit about weather (the girls are watching a magic schoolbus movie about the water cycle here. They finally have the evaporation, condensation and precipitation concept down)

Grace has been busy reading! She finished the Fablehaven series and she has been pretty depressed about being finished with the book series (she wants the series to go on forever!). She read The Secret Garden and has started The Candy Shop War series (by the same author as Fablehaven).

FINALLY...Russell has really gotten into reading! He loves The Boxcar Children series and has read four of the books in between reading all of his assigned material for his literature class.

We've been trying to get ahead on our schoolwork so that we can take a nice break during the holidays. The kids have been working straight through lunch and into the afternoon (we normally finish school around lunch time if we get an early start).

Russ and David got an elk during hunting season, and they made up a whole lot of homemade jerky. Russ learned how to butcher the elk this year. He took right to it!