A Charlie Brown Christmas

I have been feeling a bit like Charlie Brown this year and getting frustrated with the commercialism of Christmas. We decided to forgo most of our decorating this year, and only put out a few manger scenes. We also decided for the most part to forgo the gift exchanging at our house. Sounds pretty boring. But my kids tell me it was their best Christmas ever. Just before the season, I somehow happened upon a very inspiring blog. www.aholyexperience.com. Their experiences were the impetus for our celebration.

For the last year and a half, I have been doing books for a local ministry that provides a chaplain to a facility that serves children who have been removed from their homes for some type of treatment. The chaplain and his family decided that they were going to spend the day on campus and invited us to join them. Thanks to several generous donors, we brought some bounce houses and stockings for each of the kids who were unable to leave campus to be with family. We were blessed.

First LEGO League Robotics

This fall the boys were invited to join other homeschoolers on a robotics team program sponsored by FIRST and LEGO. They met every week to build a robot and work on a research project. We took 3 teams to Mountain Home, Arkansas, for competition on December 4^th.

We brought home trophies for Robot Performance, Robot Design and Quality Design. Our teams were also finalists in the award categories of Innovative Design, Champion’s Award, Quality Design, Gracious Professionalism, Programming, Project Research Quality, Judge’s Award and Robot Design.

Each team was required to do a research project on a body system and how biomedical engineering is used to help in that area. At competition, the team presented the project to judges. The teams chose vision, lungs and voice for their projects.

In the Robot Performance Competition, our teams placed 4^th, 5^th and 16^th out of 35 teams. One of our teams went on to win the single elimination competition.

I forgot to take pictures of the robots, but if I can get one from someone else, I will post it.

More Scout Photo project

Here are the rest of Erik's pics!

Scout Photography project

Erik's Scout group had a photography workshop last week. Here's what Erik shot!

Miss Angie- our instructor!

Erik's first Cardinals game!

Go Cards!

A friend gave Joe 2 tickets to the Cardinals for today and since he and Erik have been wanting to do an outing for just the 2 of them, this was perfect. They headed home after the seventh inning stretch when it was still 0-0, and as I post, there is still no score in the 14th inning. Enjoy the pics!

FLORIDA!

It has been a long hard winter. We received plane tickets to Florida as a Christmas gift. Couldn't have come at a better time. We enjoyed getting away while our friends back here in MO got 6 more inches of snow. Florida wasn't particularly warm this winter, but anything is better than what we were dealing with in MO. Here are some fun shots from our trip.

Sail away! (it looks better than it is!)

At the beach where Joe lost his glasses. There is some fish or bird that can see now!

Grandpa and the boys

We stayed the night in Kansas City with our friends Jerry and Dale before we flew out. This is Dale and the boys.