November has settled into “business as usual” with our day-to-day really settling into a routine. Not too much excitement this month. We were able to have another family over for dinner and fun. It was one of the first times we had another family over. Hopefully it will be a continuing friendship going forward. Towards the end of the month we got our first rain of the season and got to enjoy a nice fire in the fireplace. We’re enjoying the turn in weather as we head towards winter. We finished off November with the Thanksgiving holiday in Tuscon visiting with the Russin clan.
We are looking to finalize our selection for an Au Pair for 2020. We have been blessed with a wonderful fit in our first year with Valeria and we pray for another good fit.
Cordelia announced that she has passed her phonics portion at school right before Thanksgiving break. She seems to be enjoying school. She’s taking a dance class through the school and the dance class had a small performance the last week before Thanksgiving. Corrie had a relapse in some behavioral areas this month. She and Anthony have been a lot more argumentative and pestering to each other. Cordelia is thriving in Sparks, has completed her entire book and the book review. We’re hoping to slow her down a little bit so we can stretch out the remaining portions of the bonus packet to cover the rest of the year. We got the piano we received from Alicia’s grandparents tuned and Cordelia continues practicing, working on her timing.
Anthony is doing swim class and gymnastics. He’s getting better at swimming, but still does not swim completely by himself. At gymnastic he’s favorite activity is the trampoline. Anthony is enjoying Cubbies at AWANA and is doing a great job memorizing his weekly verse. We continue praying for Anthony and this month he told Tim that he said yes to Jesus! That is a very exciting thing and we’re happy that he’s choosing to love God from an early age.
Lydia is an opinionated toddler. She certainly knows the words: no, me, and stop. She also can say snack and food. She also continues in swim class. Lydia and Tim have had more quality time together with Alicia and the older kids at AWANA on Sundays. Lydia likes walking around outside, leading Tim by the hand.
Alicia’s work got very busy this month. She’s trying to fix some bugs on a high profile project that has been demanding her attention. Additionally her administrative duties have been pressing for her time. Especially at the end of the month with the Thanksgiving holiday week vacation, the pressure to get tasks completed made balancing work and home life difficult. Alicia has established a pretty good routine for her volunteer duty as AWANA Sparks director.
Tim’s work picked up a little this month. While far from busy he did get some new lab equipment to set up and test. Tim’s been getting back into some exercise this month, getting in to work early and running in the gym. At home Tim has been getting the trees along our back fence thinned out. It’s been quite an effort with about 6 days of 6 hours each outside cutting and clearing the undergrowth. Additionally we had a tree company come out to trim some of the large trees and remove two of our pine trees that had died from beetles. Tim and the kids took our home grown pumpkins and cooked them in to pumpkin pie and pumpkin cookies. Tim also smoked a turkey when we had the other family over.
December will start out busy with getting back to work. We hope to have more opportunities to have other families over and make stronger connections. While it’s still tentative on the church front, we think we may have found a good fit.
