Hmm... where to begin. Well, I would upload the cute videos of two Christmas performances with Gabriela, but it seems that the time has passed and I'll save my time here for just regular pictures. She participated in the church Christmas pageant as an angel... very angelic. Her school also had a Christmas dance as well as a choir presentation. The school dance turned out to be more fun than I had imagined, and we all had a good time. Her classmates are all very sweet children and I had fun teaching them the Hand Jive ;)
(the two angels)
(at the school dance with classmates)
We also have a birthday boy in our family in December. It was a rather simple celebration this year, but no less significant. I won't share how many birthdays this makes.
The Saturday before Christmas we were visited by some very good friends for the day. We took a little field trip with the kids. There is a place just up the road that breeds and sells saltwater fish and reef. Their store is open to browsers... it was actually quite interesting and the kids enjoyed it.
(they even had sea horses ... so cool!)
(they had lots of colorful fish. this one was particularly large and in a large tank. the b/w one in front of the blue/yellow one spit water at us!)
As is tradition, I made a lot of cookies for Christmas. Many were given as gifts to friends. But there were some special for us, and plenty to go around for all...
My parents traveled to our house for Christmas this year. They arrived Christmas Eve, and we went to a nice candlelight service at church, then in Brasilian tradition, had a late dinner. I think we were pretty hungry so there were no pictures of the people or food, but here is our table. It was really yummy. We had a great pork loin (I purchased, Fares seasoned and Fabricio/Adriana cooked it) along with several other yummies. The broccoli salad was a hit, which made me happy!
Santa was pretty good to us this year. Gabriela's cookies and letter must have convinced him we had been good :) I think we were all pleased with Christmas Day... slept in, good food, presents, movies and totally chilling. Gabriela got plenty of loot, a lot of it princess themed...
We honestly did almost nothing the rest of the weekend, though Gabriela did make a gingerbread house with her Grandma and we got out of the house one day and wound up at a state park about 40 minutes away to check it out. It was actually quite a mild day for December.
We had about a day and a half to recover, then we traveled up to Lafayette to visit friends for the New Year. It was nice to be with old friends and catch up. Again, it was pretty low key with lots of good food. On New Year's Day our friend had planned a large brasilian feijoada (black bean and pork stew) with lots of other brasilians. It was yummy. Fares and I then visited some other friends separately, and Friday returned to Indianapolis for yet more visiting and more good food. Our friend's daughter had her birthday party, which was really cute. She wanted a square dancing cake and so her mom planned a "state fair" complete with tickets, games, popcorn and corn dogs and a carousel cake.
(Gabriela all dressed up and ready for the state fair and square dancing ... which we did!)
We spent the next Sunday trying to recover from a long two week vacation. I've never felt so tired from doing so little ;) Then, we returned to real life...
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