Pumpkin carving session-- part two

Pumpkin carving session

Mr Patrick's Birthday

It isn't easy turning 7 on Halloween. The boy ended up having three birthday celebrations, three different cakes and crowds of people. On the 31st, I cooked a big lunch, my mum baked a cake, and we sang to him just the family. The happiest he was of course about the cheapest present, the transformer car. He also got a watch, and is super interested in telling the time now. He's almost got it, too. That afternoon we had the trick-or-treating march. Kimo had planned it out exactly ahead of time, so we were able to do the rounds and pick up more children (and parents driving) on the way. In the end we had 16 children marching around with a bunch of crazy grown ups in costumes (Kimo had a huge pumpkin balloon lit up on his head, I was a witch like last year), and as we had to walk near the cemetery where traffick was blocked by all the people visiting their graves for All Saint's Day, lots of cars honked at us in cheer and people were wavig to the kids. You see it's quite unusual here to dress up for Halloween since it is the Day of the Dead that is celebrated then. So after getting real frozen in the cold wind, we came to our house and sang again, and we had another cake.
Then on Sunday the 4th Patrick had his birthday party proper, where he'd invited his classmates. Only four boys showed up, but the house sure was filled with them. Bella being the only girl enjoyed being chased around, then we had a baloon throwing contest, and a brownie cake that I made. At the end when everyone left, the poor boy started crying, I think he was just overwhelmed by all the action.
But now he's officially SEVEN and can tie his shoelaces and almost tell the time. Not to mention his excellent reading skills, and his efforts in writing. I am a proud mother(but I know I've said that before).

Kids

First Snow, First Snowman

On the way to football practice for Adam and Kevin

We walked around the lake out near where they have their football (soccer) practice last week to kill a few minutes before training got started.

Kevin's swimming course

Sorry about the long silence, I'll try and slowly recover the times missed out on. Here's Kevin's three week swimming course which was in October. Every weekday we had to take him to kindergarten at 7am, a minibus (or two in fact) took the kids to the pool, and they were back at school for breakfast around 9. Kevin is not as much a water frog as Bella is, but this course was at least good to give him some security also in the big pool. He enjoyed it but getting him up early was quite a challenge. I am very proud of him, and we were lucky he didn't get ill only on the last day, we went from the pool to the doctor's.