Permanent

A few exciting things have happened since my last blog post.

First, and maybe most importantly, Jeff became a permanent resident of the United States again. He had to give up his permanent residence status about two years after we moved to Canada, and go through the whole process of applying again when we moved back. We had no idea how long the process would take, and one day we checked the status and it said we were 14 months from a decision, and the next day the application was approved. He got his card in the mail and hilariously they used his picture from 2007 (even though he sent a new photo with his application).

The second most exciting thing is that Maren got her ears pierced. She has been asking and waiting for months, and now was finally a good time (in between soccer and basketball). She is pretty thrilled.

Other stuff less exciting: we had the end of a fairly tumultuous term, where the grad student employees were on strike and then finally a month later reached an agreement, and we are all glad to have a little rest now. We are enjoying spending some time outdoors, and having our holiday celebrations :-)

Christmas tree

 Today we took the kids to a Christmas tree farm to cut our own tree. It was their second time at the tree farm but their first time wandering around and choosing and cutting a tree. It is much earlier than I would normally want to get a tree, because I really don’t like when the needles are dry and falling off by Christmas. But it has been another tough year for tree farms and they are likely to run out of U-cut trees within the next week or so. I didn’t want to risk it, so we went today.

It looks quite lovely 😊 🎄

Outdoor fun

 We have been enjoying time outside, both at home, 

and out in some natural areas nearby:

We have also been enjoying seeing the deer come through our yard:

It is nice to be in Oregon this time of year ❤️

Games

 With the weather having turned raining and colder, we are playing a lot of board games when we have time. The other night we had a family game of Rhino Hero:

Yesterday the kiddos played several games, including a few rounds of checkers:

I love that our kids are at the age where we can all play games together (sometimes with Linden on a team with one of us), and even better Maren and Linden can play games on their own. It is a phase of parenthood that I have been looking forward to, and it is just beginning so there will be many years of it to come ❤️

Piano prodigies

These kids are too cute: