Merry Christmas from all of us in the Patterson household. Enjoy our 2011 Christmas video greeting!
The end of the school year brings with it end of the year recitals. We don’t have any gymnastics videos this year but we do have a video of Elisabeth playing with the Bannockburn Elementary School Symphonetta. The symphonetta is made up almost entirely of third graders, which is the first year of orchestra at Bannockburn. In the clip below they play “Calypso.” At the end you can watch a related video in which they play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
Yesterday I spent a good part of the day reading the Slovak law about visa requirements and searching for websites that could possibly help explain the process of applying for a visa.
It’s hard to believe we’ve been in the States for more than five years now. We’re looking forward to going back to Slovakia, but it’s nice to look back at some of the memories we’ve made. I don’t know how I got so lucky, but I happened to have the video camera out one night when I had the kids to myself. This is a funny video buy of Elisabeth (3) and Max (2) talking about Dora and the Wiggles.
On New Year’s Eve I spent 45 minutes conducting delicate surgery on a miniDV cassette in hopes of recovering our lost video clips from our 2005 vacation in Croatia. Was it worth it? From all of us to all of you with heartfelt thanks for your friendship: I hope you enjoy our video rendition of the annual family Christmas letter. At our house, we have our time of family Scripture reading and prayer before bedtime. One Sunday Max decided he wanted to read the Bible during our family worship time. Then Elisabeth decided she wanted to join in. What followed was a mix of liturgical church service and family devotions. It was actually pretty impressive. Have you wondered what Jana’s Music Together classes are like? I suppose it’s hard to imagine how you can offer music classes to children from birth to kindergarten. What are those kids able to even do? I’m sure my descriptions don’t do it justice nor even the few videos (and here) that we’ve posted in the past. Here’s another video that might help fill in the picture. Elisabeth and Max had their last swimming lesson today. They both made lots of improvement during their four weeks of lessons. A couple weeks ago Elisabeth wanted to show me her new diving skills–but not until she was good and ready, and had a little fun teasing me. Max thought the diving looked like fun so he mustered up his courage to see if he could do it, too. Max tends to go through phases. One of his first phases was cowboys, then came dinosaurs, then Thomas, then primates. When he’s in a phase he’s 100%. So when he was into primates he started becoming fanatic about climbing everything. He climbs trees, of course, but when he’s inside I’m one of his favorite climbing objects, and sometimes a door will do just as well. I guess it makes sense that he also likes gymnastics. This last year he took a pre-gymnastics course and during the last class Jana was able to take some clips of their activities. Click through for the video. |   |
| |
