November Notables

Well, here we are at the end of November, and I have not posted anything yet! The month has once again flown by... and I can't remember what happened! Good thing I have pictures to refresh my memory... here goes:

On November 12th, the CCS Ladies Auxiliary (of which I am a member) hosted our annual Stampot Dinner Fundraiser. This is an always popular event, we cook and serve a good old Dutch meal of Stampot (kale, carrot or sauerkraut), farmers sausage, applesauce (homemade this year!), buns, pickles, gravy, and cake and ice cream for dessert! Admission is by donation, this year we had a record profit of about $1500!!! 4 of us ladies cooked dinner for 200, served it and cleaned up after. A very long and busy day, we were sure tired by the time we got home, but boy, did we have fun! And with that profit, it was all worth it!

Last year we sold off the leftovers for $5/bag. This year, someone suggested we auction them. For a lark, we roped one of the men into being auctioneer. Would you believe we made $200 on leftovers?!? One gentleman spent almost $75 on 2 Ziploc bags (large size) of boerrenkoel met wurst! There was some fierce competition, and lots of laughing... and the money will be put to good use in the school.

Zoe doing some coloring after helping us set up the tables (she put the crayons on)

Hard at work!

Check out the potato mashers - we took out all our frustrations on those poor potatoes!

We had to take time out to look at this gorgeous sunset!

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Would you believe this is November 14?? Last year we were buried in snow, this year the kids are playing outside in shirtsleeves. You'll notice Natalies' princess headband.

Swings...

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Also, Allison had her eyes checked (finally - she's been on a waiting list since August!) and surprise, surprise, she needs glasses! With our family history, I was almost expecting it, but she hadn't shown any signs of being nearsighted.

Here she is in her funky pink/turquoise frames.

Makes it a bit easier to tell them apart, hey? Now if only people could remember which twin has glasses. Sigh. (I did take Amanda in last week, but she is fine - for now)

I asked her about a week later if the glasses were helping her see better. She said that if she didn't wear them, things far away look foggy. But not when she puts her glasses on. So I guess she did need them after all...

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Natalie's friend Mckenna's Mom had a baby earlier this month, so we took Mckenna for a day. They had lots of fun together!

We made cookies....

And they WERE playing playdough. But apparently it was more fun to wear the buckets on their heads and pretend to be astronauts.....

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In other news, our new minister and his family (the Bredenhof's) arrived in London! The installation service was last Sunday (Nov 22) and the welcome evening was last night. This morning there was a pancake breakfast at the school. I did not have my camera at any of these events, sorry.... but they were enjoyable none the less!

We are so blessed to have had such a short period of vacancy here in London! We hope the Bredenhof's soon feel at home here! Their oldest daughter is in Natalie's kindergarten class. When we stopped in the day after they moved to bring them some dinner, they were INSTANT best friends! It was really cute.... so now Natalie is not the only kindergarten student in our congregation.

That's all for now...