Christmas 2012

Christmas!  We had a great Christmas this year!

The girls had fun decorating our Christmas tree :)

 Of course they had to decorate the tree while wearing dress-up clothes.... just about everything they do at home requires them to wear dress-up clothes :) haha!

 The Sunday before Christmas the Hindi Church Kids did a cute performance :)

 Here are the Hindi Church kids with their Christmas Presents :)

 Diya loved playing with the tree :)

 We decorated a gingerbread house this year :)

 Diya loved the icing :) haha!

 Diya always poses when I pull out the camera :) haha!

 Here's our Gingerbread House! :)

 We always celebrate Christmas as a family on Christmas Eve :)  Since the girls have school on Christmas Eve, we celebrated when they woke up from their naps :)  Here they are waiting to go into the living room and open their presents :)

 You can see that Aashini is still a little sleepy :) haha!

 Diya was excited about opening her presents :)

 Here's little Cindy Lou Who getting ready to go to bed on Christmas Eve :)

Christmas Morning!  The girls are all dressed up to go to Church! ;)

 After church we went to our friend's house with some friends to eat and have fun :)  Here's our friend Faisal with the Gingerbread house :)

 I just thought this picture was cute :)

 The kiddos eyeing the sweets! :)

 We ended the day with some Speed Uno! :)

 Here are the girls enjoying their new microphones :)

 On the 26th the girls had a Christmas party at school... they were supposed to dress up like Santa or a Fairy :)  Here are the girls (without their wings :))

It was a great Christmas!!

Christmas Activities :)

For Christmas, the Children's Min at our Chuch took the kids to a Girl's Home to do a program for the girls that live there.  

 Aashini LOVED singing for them :)

 Diya was super shy at first, but then warmed up later :)  Here she is singing :) I think she looks cute in this picture :)

 Here's Aashini singing :)

 Next they did crafts :)

 Aashini made friends with one little girl... she patiently stood there while the girl examined her skin ;) haha!

 The kids gave gifts to all of the girls.  Aashini gave a gift to her little friend first :)

 Diya loved giving gifts too!

 After that, we all ate!  It was a lot of fun :)  The kiddos had fun :)

Christmas Day!

We had a great Christmas :) The girls had a lot of fun with food and friends :)

Diya was only a month old last Christmas so this one really felt more like her first Christmas :) She had a lot of fun :)

Aashini really had fun :) She was cute :)

She got a fun new soft elephant :)

Diya was mesmerized by her glow worm.

Aashini had fun playing :)

Diya hugging her glow worm :) I love those things (they came in handy tonight when the power was out and our inverter - battery back-up - stopped working :))

Diya was exhausted and took a long morning nap :)

Aashini had a yearbook photo shoot on Christmas morning, so it worked out that we could go over there before we did other things. Here's Diya with Aashini's main teacher - Jaspreet.

For the photo shoot they did the whole family, the girls with me, the girls with Adam and just the girls... it was pretty funny :)

They were cute :)

More pics on the other blog :) Check it out!

We're leaving tomorrow for the Middle East for a couple of weeks. I still have some Christmas posts, but they'll have to wait a few weeks... see you in the Gulf!

Christmas :)

Christmas is almost here! Our city has decked itself out a lot more than normal this year, so it's felt a lot more like Christmas. Aashini is a lot more interested in Christmas this year. I'm excited to see how she continues to experience Christmas this year :) Fun!

Christmas DRAMA!

So last Sunday Aashini was in a Christmas Drama/Musical at Chrch. Aashini LOVES the microphone and stage, so we weren't sure how it would go... Before it started, Aashini and her friend Evie seemed to be excited about the mic :)

They got all lined up on the stage. Aashini was excited to get started :)

They told all of the kids to sit down. Aashini stood in front of the mic...

Then the drama begins... no, not the musical drama, but Aashini's drama.... Her and Evie started fighting over the microphone... oh yeah, I was embarrassed...

... Evie won... and Aashini pitched a fit!

She stayed on the sidelines for the first song. At the 2nd song she wanted to go back to the stage... so she stood in the very front of the stage and sort-of pouted...

Then Evie left the stage to sit with her parents and Aashini took over the microphone...

She was super happy to have the microphone in her control...

...then she realized that the mic was turned off. She started tapping the microphone and motioning to let people know it was off...

She had fun at the end. It was quite the experience - haha! First Drama performance was full of Drama.... You can see for yourself :)

Here's a little bit of video of the performance/drama :) (if the video doesn't work, click here)