This Saturday was our annual bake-off. Every family makes a dessert and has a commercial to “sell” the dessert. The night was filled with laughter, fun and yummy food.

Award for Best Skit

Last week was Broomball night! We cleared the chairs and tables from our Dining Room, set up goal posts, chose teams, and with our brooms and running shoes proceeded to have a wonderful night of fun.

This is our second year doing an Advent Walk; during the walk we have different scenes set up around one of the lawns illustrating the story of the Nativity. At each scene we stop, read a portion of scripture and listen to a song that illustrates that scene. We work our way around in this manner to each of the scenes of the story, starting with the Annunciation and ending with Christ’s birth.

 The scenes of the Nativity are made out of rough, painted plywood and are lit using small florescent flashlights.

Mary and Joseph with their donkey going to Bethlehem

The Three Magi

The Manger (left: shepherds, middle: oxen, right: Mary, Joseph, Jesus)

It was extremely cold outside, but we all enjoyed the Advent Walk and the richness that it brings to our Christmas time together.

This year’s Harvest Party theme was superheroes. The week before Harvest Party, we carved pumpkins to fit the superhero theme. A Gotham City skyline, an eight foot city skyscraper made from cardboard and various superhero symbols were our decorations.

 The costumes were very creative as most were handmade. It was a fun night with food, games, cotton candy and skits.

Even a few super villains showed up!

Last week was our annual pumpkin carving night. This year’s theme was super heroes. We had many different types of carvings ranging from Larry-Boy to Superman and Doctor Octopus. It was a fun, messy night together.

Here are the finished, lit pumpkins

Here is a template that was used for the Angel pumpkin.

This Friday we played a few games that rely heavily on teamwork. For the first, we had to all sit in a circle and all stand up at the exact same time without using our hands for leverage.

  The second game was a conveyor belt. We had people line up in two lines and link hands with the person directly across from them. We then had to get some of the younger kids all the way down the line.

This Friday we celebrated April Fool’s day. Everyone dressed up and we had a fun time playing games and fellowshipping.

For this year’s Harvest Party we decided to do a science fiction theme. The week before we carved science fiction pumpkins to display at the party. The teens made the decorations: planets and a huge AT-AT Walker made out of spray painted cardboard.

Everyone dressed up in science fiction themed costumes, all of which were very creative. It was a night of fun, laughter, skits and fellowship.

We had a few visitors from Pluto, protesting that Pluto is no longer a planet, as well as a stormtrooper and multiple aliens.

This year we decided to make our annual Harvest Party a space/science-fiction theme. With the party being only one week away, we made our pumpkin carvings space themed as well so we could use them in the decorations!

We broke up into teams of twos and threes and started carving away. After two hours of steady scooping, cutting, and scraping, we switched off the lights and admired each other’s creations. The pumpkins are currently being stored in our walk-in refrigerator to preserve them for the party.

Everyone was very creative this year, creating rocket ships, Yoda, Darth Vader, aliens, and a moon walking astronaut. A few people created templates before hand to help with their carving. We have scanned a few of these into PDFs for you to download and use on your own pumpkins if you’d like!

Darth Vader Template
Yoda Template
Moon Walker Template
Moon Rover Template

Lately the kids (and some of the adults) have been playing different sports after dinner and before celebration night. This past Friday’s game was football. These are some of the pictures that were taken during the game.