Jeremiah the Conductor

Patrick's Slides

These are some pictures of my brother Patrick, scanned from old slides. They show his 7th birthday and other activities when my family lived in Germany.

Snow-Shoveling is Fun!

Monroe and Jeremiah were kind enough to shovel our driveway for us. What good boys!

Sledding in our Backyard

We have had a couple of decent snowstorms, and the boys had a lot of fund doing the first sledding of the year.

Parade of Lights - What are we teaching our children?

After a fun day of raking MORE leaves and putting up Christmas lights on the house, we ended the day with a fun trip in the car to downtown Valley City (a total of about 3 minutes in the car) to watch the Parade of Lights.  After spending about 15-20 minutes getting everyone dressed and bundled up to stay warm and then buckled in their carseats, the 10 minute parade almost didn't seem worth the hassle, but at least the kids had fun, right?  Then I think about what we are teaching our children with this type of family activity and how it is completely contridicting to what we try to teach them at home.  1)  That is okay, and in fact encouraged to run in the street and 2) that it is perfectly fine to take candy from strangers.  Oh the joys of parenthood!  It's amazing we ever survived childhood.

Big Paw on Thanksgiving

We were watching the Bernstein Bears' Thanksgiving video "Big Paw" and the boys thought it was very funny.

Duck Dance

This is Mandi teaching Monroe and Jeremiah to do the German Duck Dance as part of Mandi's birthday festivities.