Merry Christmas!

Wishing you and your family a blessed Christmas,
full of joy and happiness as we remember the true meaning of the season.
Merry Christmas!!

Claudio, Nancy, Sera, Elena, Kayla, Ian, Asher, Esther and Emma

Miss Glamorous

For the last two weeks, Emma has worn this pair of pink sunglasses every day. She wakes up, and they are on her head. She goes to school with them on her head, eats lunch with them and even takes a nap with them still on her head. Is this just a sign of things to come?
We already call her Miss Glamorous, and as she gets older she wants more of a say in what she wears.. and what she thinks looks cute, or matches. She's got quite a little opinion on her and she's not afraid to share that with you. Her favorite color is PINK.. everything has to be pink. (Although, she will tolerate red and purple) Haha.. I can't wait to see what she's like in her teenage years. Sharpay from High School Musical? That's her favorite character!

Unlike Miss Glamorous, Esther is a bit more relaxed when it comes to the fashion department.
But I think she's going to end up being a Prep!

Sister love

And the boys being boys.. playing with styrofome.

Celebrating Advent

During the month of December, our family has been celebrating Advent. Each night as we read our devotionals, we light a candle and add another candle each week leading up to Christmas. Each candle in the wreath represents the four weeks leading up to Christmas. It's a nice time to be together as a family and the coming celebration of Christ's birth.
Since the younger kids don't understand as much, we also have an Advent calender that counts down the days 'til Christmas with figurines from the Nativity. The kids love the calender and seem to always fight over whose turn it is to move the nativity figure!

Reading our devotional book

Our advent wreath.. and Esther =)

Being silly..

The advent calender

Asher and Elly

Ivy in front of our Christmas tree

Asher's first ornament

One of my mom's favorite ornaments- I made this in pre-school when I was four years old.
It's nothing more than a plastic spoon with a piece of gold foil wrapped around it, but it's been
on our tree every year!

ICE in Florida?

A few weeks ago, we visited the ICE exhibit located at a nearby resort/convention center. The ICE exhibit is made out of nearly 2 million pounds of ice, hand carved by Chinese artists.
Every year, millions of people visit the city of Harbin in northern China for the annual ice festival. Several of those artists traveled to Florida to design and create the many ice sculptures that make up the exhibit. So you could say we have our own mini Harbin Ice Festival here in sunny Florida! Of course, to keep the ice from melting in these sweltering 80 degrees temps, they have to keep the exhibit at a freezing 9 degrees!!
So we all dug through to the backs of our closets and suited up in our warmest gear and headed over anticipating the freezing temps ahead of us. Fortunately, the exhibit provides (ugly) but warm parkas. It was really neat and the kids had a blast.
We came here two years ago just before we brought Esther home, so it was nice to do this again.

Hehe.. so we dared Emma to lick this giant cupcake! She didn't think it tasted very good.

The Nativity Scene-one of the prettiest pieces out of the entire exhibit!

We all joked that Asher must have been the warmest out of all of us, since he comes from chilly Dandong in Northern China!

Poor Dad was the designated purse holder while the rest of the family waited in line to try out the large ice slide.

Foggy glasses!