She’s been 15 for more than 2 weeks, but she still can’t blow out the candles on her cake.  Multiple years, now, she’s caught the giggles right before the big moment.  This year she extinguished . . . one candle.  One.  Her little sister helped with the rest.

Having strong recollections of how some of my other kidlets struggled with ice skating when they were Mr. TOF’s age, I mentioned to him several times when he was begging to go skating,”You know, skating is tricky.  It’s harder than it looks.  You can’t just put on skates and go.…

He might not play hockey, but hockey hair?  He’s got that down. During holiday break from school my kidlets discovered the ice skating rink that has always been within walking distance.  Somehow we never paid attention to it before, but now the bigger kidlets can walk there themselves, and they’ve…

This Christmas my grocery lists have been written bilingually. I hear carols hummed and sung in two different languages. We got to see two sisters over the moon excited about an enormous Christmas light display. I actually managed to take a picture of all the kids dressed up on Christmas…

When your children make post Christmas pancakes and a drinking glass meets the frying pan . . .   (At least it looks like a happy smile?)

This came home from school two days ago. So completely random.  So completely him.  He thinks he can keep the hippo in the garden shed.

The oldest sister we are hosting is SO ridiculously excited about Christmas.  I may never have seen a living human so excited about the holiday in my whole life!  Wonderfully festive signs of all sizes like the one above are hanging from all sorts of surfaces in in the house.…

One of the girls we are hosting is a checkers expert.  She has won many checkers competitions, and believe me, I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of ever being able to beat her.  She’s 10 moves ahead of me at all times!  She plays international checkers, or international…

Do you like to people watch?  I highly recommend hanging out at the International Arrivals door at the airport.  Last week the two girls from Latvia arrived!  We had to be at the airport quite early, and it was a long, hard wait because we were ridiculously excited for them…

A few years ago my mom gifted me the nativity set that my Grandma Edna made her.  When I was growing up, the nativity set had a special place at Christmas time on a little cabinet in our kitchen that we called the dry sink.  We stood on tiptoe and…