Often times as parents we ask ourselves whether we are doing a good job; whether what we say and so is having a positive impact on our children. More often than not, the answer is rather humbling, but occasionally there are glimpses of success. Here is a small one of ours, with a bit of humour.

The other day I was working in garden in the backyard with Miriam and we came across a yellow badminton birdie. Miriam picked it up, looked at it and promptly threw it over the fence to our neighbour's yard without so much as a word. When I asked her why she did that, she replied, "It's not ours, we don't have any yellow ones." Our neighbours, a middle-aged couple, who have an adult son are not known to be avid badminton players, but there was a day a few months ago that their son had a few friends over and set up a badminton net. Upon prying a bit further, I discovered that every couple of days for the past couple of months, Miriam will find the yellow birdie in our yard and dutifully throw it back over the fence. Apparently our neighbours believe it is ours. This made me chuckle a bit, so I thought I should let Miriam know this and suggested that next time we just hold onto it. She was adamant that we couldn't possibly keep it, because it isn't ours, "and that would be stealing." I asked her what she thought we should do, to which she replied, "I guess we'll just keep playing tennis with the neighbours."

This is a new little feature that I will be adding to the blog occasionally. It is a newsletter that Jakob publishes now and again. Don’t let “Weekly” in the title fool you though…in some areas he is like his dad. Anyways, I hope you enjoy it.

Read the Weekly Newz

I have now linked the Photos tab (see top right corner) with my Flickr account. My photo sets on Flickr will show up as a list on the right side of the page and clicking on one of the sets will launch a Flickr slideshow on the main section of the page.

There are a couple of new sets available as of a couple of days ago: Awana Grand Prix 2009 and Jakob’s Birthday 2009.

Enjoy!

Here is a link to our Flickr photo set with some family photos from the Families with Children from China (FCC) New Year's celebration.

http://flickr.com/gp/aldoms/40313o

Enjoy!

I'm sort of the Halloween equivalent of Ebineezer Scrooge. I'm not a big fan...and am always happy when Halloween is over and the stores start breaking out the Christmas decorations. I do happen to really like Christmas. :) Having said all of that, we do let the kids have some fun on Halloween. We usually let them Trick-or-treat around to the neighbours and then head off to Trinity Western University for their Harvestfest (think lots of games and candy without all of the evil-looking costumes). Below is a photo of our three munchkins dressed up in their costumes (Jakob - hockey goalie, Miriam - lamb, Matias - Fireman).