Thursday, 4 January, 2006

I had my INS Interview on November 21st for citizenship.  The letter I received instructed me to be at the INS office by 11:30.  It failed to note that the wait could be up to two hours.  I think I ended up waiting well over one hour.  Chris finally took Amy and Misha to get lunch while I kept Kristen.  My turn finally came before they arrived back so they allowed me to bring Kristen back with me.  Normally they don’t.  She started to get fussy halfway through my interview so the officer called out to the waiting area to see if Chris had returned.  He had so we made a quick child transfer.  The interview progressed with the dreaded interview questions about U.S. government.  It was actually rather easy.  The computer generated a random list of ten questions, and I had to get six correct.  I passed.  I am now waiting for information on the swearing in ceremony.  I was supposed to receive information about it two to four weeks after my interview, but wouldn’t you know, nothing has come yet.

Kristen’s first tooth broke through November 23 and the second one-both on the bottom-appeared one week later.  She was rather crabby, so we knew something was coming.  As of yet, no other teeth are showing through but she chews on things non-stop.

Chris has been teaching another University of Phoenix class that began in December.  Fortunately they gave him a two week break over the Christmas holiday so that he wouldn’t have to reschedule.  The nice thing about the timing of this class is that the money from this class paid for Christmas.  We actually came out ahead rather than having to play catch-up in January.  When we went to Tithing Settlement, we realized that even though we were conscientiously paying extra tithing, we had paid A LOT extra.  So even without paying any tithing in December, we still had everything covered.

Carbon Valley Academy held their first annual school Christmas concert at LifeBridge Christian Church.  It was rather chaotic to say the least with kids filing on and off the stage and waiting for them to do it.  The kids did great and wouldn’t you know it, Amy found her way up to the top of the stage with the older kids.  She was pretty nervous about the concert.  Someone at school at told her that they would be performing in front of thousands of people.  This was at the same time as the stomach malady.  Actually we thought that might have been the problem of it all, but her stomach problems continue on.

A couple weeks before Christmas, we bundled up the kids to take them into Longmont for the annual Christmas parade.  We pulled out snow pants, gloves, hats, scarves-eveything to try and stay warm.  As we headed into town on Hwy 119, Chris all of a sudden saw a car in the west-bound lanes flashing its lights as we drove in the east-bound lane.  Suddenly, coming toward us was a car going west bound in our east bound lane.  Chris swerved into the right lane, and we narrowly missed a head-on collision.  We pulled over onto the shoulder and Chris quickly called 911 to report the guy.  We were so lucky and blessed not to have been hurt.

Turns out though that we had a mix-up in our dates and the Christmas parade wasn’t even scheduled for that night.

We certainly had an enjoyable Christmas.  The girls were so excited for it.  Amy was finished school on the 16th of December and Misha on the 20th.  I must say I now understand the whole craziness of moms feeling hectic with kids on vacation.  Amy and Misha seemed to fight more and subsequently get on my nerves more.  I imagine a lot of it is just that they had so much more time to spend together.

Instead of honoring the Rice family tradition of having chinese food on Christmas Eve, I gave in and we went to Olive Garden instead.  I knew that at least they would eat the food there.  After our meal, we hurried home to watch a Christmas DVD about Jesus’ birth.  We followed that with our traditional pajama Christmas Eve gift and then off to bed for the girls.

We had purchased a trampoline for the girls and had planned to set it up in the living room.  After the girls were in bed, Chris headed over to a friends house to retrieve the trampoline from his garage.  We moved the furniture out of the living room and began the process.  Our friends had told us that setting up the trampoline was easy but once we started, we wondered what they could mean.  After we had it halfway done, we decided that we didn’t want to finish, take it done and have to do it all over again.  Our wonderful Christmas morning surprise was deflating fast.  Sadly we took the trampoline outside and decided to try and set it up out there.  We started again and noticed that we were off on the springs.  Oh well, at 11:30 pm in the freezing cold, we decided to throw in the towel.  We took the mat in the living room.  The impact was lost, but they still had a fun day.