What a weekend!

We had a packed weekend at the beginning of the week; so packed that we were splitting up our family--1 parent to the swimming meet, 1 parent to take care of swimming lessons, birthday party attendance etc. And then we added 2 more "events" to our Saturday/Sunday schedule....but what a memorable weekend it turned out to be!

FRIDAY NIGHT:
Neenah has this Christmas celebration every year--the stores on Wisconsin Ave. participate in "live manequins" with their storefront windows. We've never attended....because.....1) we lived "all the way" in Appleton (haha for those of you who know that joke!) and 2) last year, we were still recovering from the big move, still knee deep in boxes etc.

But this year, Jayna's choir was going to be caroling during the festivities and it gave us a REASON to go out in the very cold night air. And what fun it was! (You will notice that Ava and Colin are not captured in our photos--Ava was very overtired from a long week of no napping and not feeling very photogenic. And Colin? Well....he was afraid of the manequins!)

Here is the Badger State Girl Choir caroling:

To catch a listen to the choir, click HERE.

And here are some photos of the window displays. It is so neat, the photos don't do the displays justice. Looks like we have ourselves a new December tradition....even if it's freezing cold outside!

After the Friday night festivities, we hurried home to put the kids to bed, especially Ellie. Saturday morning, she was ready to swim in the Green Bay Sprint meet...and sprint was the key word of the day!
Here are some photos I captured....note her new cap that actually has her NAME on it. We love the easy identification of our little swimmer!

And this collage captures her Saturday swimming success. The collage is read from left to right, top to bottom, like a book:
1st row: starting her 50 yd breastroke event
scoreboard for that event...Ellie got 2nd place!
preparing for her 50 yd backstroke event

2nd row: scoreboard for that event; another 2nd place!
Ellie swimming the 50 yd freestyle
scoreboard for that event; 4th place this time

3rd row: the relay swimmers
starting off the 100 yd freestyle relay
and the scoreboard for the relay....FIRST PLACE!

For your viewing pleasure, HERE is the 50 freestyle (Ellie's in the middle lane shown on the camera.)
And HERE is the "sprint" in action as she starts off the relay. (Ellie's relay is in lane 3.)

It was a super fun swimming meet. We're seeing the effects of practice this year, especially as she "gets" how to swim competitively!

But now we must back up 2 days to Thursday night. Andy was reading The Christmas Story to Ava before bed. In this particular book, the very last page has a flap with a huge heart on it. If you lift the flap, you see a picture of baby Jesus lying in a manger with John 3:16 written underneath.

When they finished, Ava said "I have a little place in my heart where Jesus can live", to which Andy replied "You are right Ava, but you haven't asked Him into your heart...do you want to do that tonight?", to which she said (in typical Ava fashion) "No, maybe tomorrow!". On Friday morning at breakfast, all of a sudden a quiet little voice said "I want to ask Jesus into my heart!". Suddenly everything stopped and then the girls started cheering for Ava! We talked about sin, we talked about Jesus saving us from sin, and Ava prayed to God, asking Jesus into her heart. It was beautiful.

Our tradition with this is that we get the girls a little cross necklace and have a party....we had a heart brownie "cake" and Ava got her necklace...

It was a joyous time, that is for sure.

Then, December 5th is the night that St. Nick visits the homes of Wisconsin. I'm not sure if any other states in the USA do this tradition, in all the states we've lived, I had never heard of it until we moved here! We've never participated....until this year....and of course, we put our own spin on it.

Each year the kids get new PJs for Christmas, on Christmas Eve. This year, we decided it would be fun for them to wear the PJs all month long and we were going to give the PJs on St. Nick Night and read the story about St. Nick. In a nutshell, he was all about generosity. More giving, less focus on receiving of gifts. Beautiful little book, that's for sure. The kids loved it, and they loved their new pjs. We loved taking photos of the fun we had:
In this collage, Andy is reading to the kids about St. Nick and then they are opening their gift. We tried to get a good group photo, but for some reason, it just wasn't in the cards last night! In the bottom right photo, Colin actually THOUGHT he was participating appropriately!

And for the candid photos....which had all of us laughing...

until Andy asked Colin to hug his best buddy Ava...and then we REALLY laughed at Colin the Clown...

And to top off the weekend, we slowly started a new endeavor that is my least favorite part of parenting. Potty training. Ugh.....to be continued....hopefully the training goes speedily!