Alison is writing a math contest tomorrow (hopefully)

http://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/pcf.html

This is the Pascal contest put on by University of Waterloo. She purposed to write this thing on the first day of grade 9, and has been completing old tests since then. Unfortunately, she has a very bad cold today -- she's hoping she feels better in the morning as she tends to get flaky when writing tests if she's sick. It's really a no-brainer ... only the student gets the result unless they are in the top so many, so it won't count against her at all. It could be very positive though if she does do well. I sure appreciate her willingness to try new things :-).

A review of "Annie" that we hadn't seen earlier, and an extremely rare photograph of yours truly ;-)

Thanks to a friend who kept this Wellington Times article around for quite some time. It mentions both Claire and Kevin by name, which is sort of cool. As always, click on the images to enlarge.





And secondly, an extremely rare photograph of myself, taken as we were running out the door for a lovely Valentine's meal at Paulo's in Belleville. Kev had been given a gift certificate for Christmas, and we decided we'd spend the whole thing on just us ;-). It was lovely! You can just see the scarf I'm wearing ... I'll have to get some photographs of the scarves Kev brought home. This was one of the scarves woven by the Karen tribe woman whose photograph Kev took.

Hi all

I haven't had a whole lot of time to blog lately ... just busy juggling school, work, transportation to events etc. I quickly wanted to mention that lambs will start arriving no earlier than about the 25th of March, for those who visit because of farm interests :-).

The girls had a wonderful weekend at Joy Bible Camp. The leaders took the group through a video/book series for Josh Harris' "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" -- a book that all the girls in this house have already read and loved. It correlates well with my long-held theory that dating is the best preparation for divorce there is! (But that's for another time). Apparently there was lots of animated discussion, in particular from the kids who ARE dating right now :-). There was also tubing, sledding, snowboarding (Claire was able to give it a try), long discussions well in to the night and pranking, in no particular order. Fun times!

One photo for now ...

Kevin took about 100 photographs .... which would be 20 separate entries here. I'm looking at alternatives since that's a pretty time-consuming endeavour :-). But I leave you with this to start:

Kev was able to take a raft trip upriver from Chaing Rai and visit the Karen tribe village of Ruammi. The Karens are considered a "long-neck" tribe; the women wear rings around their necks with numbers increasing as they age. A child may have four; a women would have many more. He did get photos of this, but I won't be posting more pics until later.

Thanks, Kev, by the way, for checking in to the blog from Bangkok ... I now have Thailand on my map of readers :-). Since this is a private blog, that's a big deal!

Photo of the girls with some friends ...

Back (left to right): Alison, Emily Griffin (our new pastor's awesome 14 year old daughter) and Claire
Front: Amy, a really great homeschooled teen who the girls have been friends with since we moved here :-).

This photo was taken by Amy's mom, Vic, I believe during apple picking in October.