Music, Bright Lights, Thansgiving, and More!

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging much lately. Life has been even busier and crazier than usual! We have a bunch of Christmas concerts coming up, which means tons and tons of rehearsals and practicing! Check out our website for our singing/playing schedule! That just has what we're doing for Peterson Family singers; there are also both of the homeschool choirs, the children's and chancel choirs at church, the church handbell choir, the church and homeschool orchestras, and pieces that various members of our family are doing as individuals. We're also planning to go caroling: once with the church choir, once with the Lyceum choir, and once with CCC.

Music isn't all we're involved in right now! Cecily and I are involved in our Bright Lights group, which meets the first and third Tuesdays of every month. I also have a leaders meeting the first Saturdays of each month with Allison and the other small group leaders. Knut is involved in First Lego League, and just had a competition yesterday! His, team, the Robo Raiders qualified to advance to the state round. One of his school assignments for the next week is to write a good-sized blog post about FLL, so you'll be hearing more about that soon.

Let's see... what else is going on right now? School, of course... baking... sewing our new uniforms (well, until part of the sewing machine broke)... the last day of Lyceum... church... all the rest of the usual stuff. I have a drama performance on the 22nd, with a couple more rehearsals before. On Thursday, some friends of ours will have a presentation at their house about their mission trips to Ecuador. They had one last week which was really awesome! Our maternal grandparents will be coming for Thanksgiving, and our paternal grandparents in the middle of December.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, we have our blessing tree up! Our blessing tree has been a tradition since I was in first grade. We tape the trunk and branches of a construction paper tree onto the glass of our front door and cut out lots of leaves out of red, yellow, orange, green, and brown construction paper. Every day, each member of our family writes down something they're thankful for on one of the leaves, puts their name or initial, and tapes it onto the tree. By Thanksgiving, the tree (and the rest of the glass, too!) is full of leaves/blessings! Here is our tree so far.

Hmmm...I wonder if the entire door will be filled with leaves before Thanksgiving? :)

In case you were wondering, some of the 'blessings' listed on the leaves are:

Hot Chocolate

Legos

Gorillas

My monkey

Oatmeal

Bagels

Me

(Note: these are some of the silly ones. We do have more serious ones on there, such as 'freedom', 'salvation', 'family', etc.) :)