Micah has two weeks off! I am so excited for our family to get some time together. We really need it, and to top everything off God blessed us with a significant raise. What a special blessing! So...for now most of my family is sleeping...Blaine is watching the Christmas Star...and I am catching up with classmates on Facebook.
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I am almost done with my Christmas shopping. I just have a few things to figure out for my brother, my cousins, my nieces, and my nephew. I am super excited about the gifts we got our girls this year. We found two wonderful cookbooks for Elizabeth. One is called A Mermaid Cookbook and has recipes that look like things you would find on the beach or in the sea. It is so beautiful, and I think she will really like it. The other is a 1957 Betty Crocker Cookbook for Boys and Girls. It has lists with pictures of every utensil you need to stock your kitchen, basic recipes for cooking eggs and other common things everyone needs to know. It is fantastic, and I can't wait for her use it. For Rebecca I found an American Girl Gymnastics book! What a find. It has excerpts of famous gymnasts, what to do if you get injured, how to's on the bar etc, how to do your hair (she'll love that), posters, etc. And it was only $9! One of the most exciting things for me is that I get 20% off with my teacher's discount.
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Rebecca jumped from the low bar to the high bar in her class on Thursday. They were supposed to learn that skill in their next class, but she asked her teacher if she could try. She did it! Many of the girls were timid about trying, but all of them tried after she did it. I was so button busting proud of her!
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Another exciting thing is that both of our girls have been very excited about reading for the first time ever. Micah made this wonderful reading chart at the beginning of the fall semester, and Elizabeth filled hers in very quickly. Rebecca has been sort of dragging her feet and just getting a little done each day and only because I make her. Well, she finally got to the halfway prize of getting to pick out a $5 book. She chose a Christmas fairy book and read it in 3 days. She is now only 30 minutes away from finishing her entire chart. We bought her the second fairy book, and she stayed up last night reading and reading. Finally I told her she had to go to bed. She told me the cutest thing, "It's amazing how when you find something you like to read, you just don't want to stop." Whew. Maybe there's hope for us yet!