Year in Review Video

Good morning, everyone! Or whatever time of day you happen to be reading this….

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you may know that every year, our family puts together a video with all our favourite pictures, along with our “song of the year” – the song everyone wanted to hear when we’d turn on music to listen to while we cleaned up the kitchen after supper every day. We’ve been making these videos for six years or something like that, and the kids love to go back and watch all the old videos repeatedly. It’s such a fun thing to have to look back on.:)

Anika has taken over the job of putting this project together, and it makes me so happy to watch it! Here’s the best of our year:

Video: Our Miracle Baby

Today is Everett’s birthday! He is currently stuffing his face with pancakes and turkey sausage, so I think he’s enjoying the day so far.

I’ll share his birthday favorites on Monday, but for today, here’s a video I’ve been working on – the story of how God gave us our miracle baby. If you’ve been a regular reader for awhile, you’ve probably read parts of this story before, but I wanted to tell it from the beginning. God is so good! Feeling so thankful for our sweet boy, today and every day!

Looking Back at 2014

Happy Monday, everyone! I have a video to share with you on this cold, crisp morning! Keeping with tradition, we’ve put together a slideshow of this last year. We’ve done this for the last three or four years, and it’s always fun for our family to look back on videos from previous years.

There’s just something about putting music and pictures together – it kinda makes life feel like those emotional moments in a movie, when the music swells, and everything looks so perfect, and makes you forget all the hard, negative stuff!

Here’s 2014, in review:

Hearing God’s Voice

Alright, we’re trying something new, and doing today’s recap in video format! Here’s the talk I shared this morning:

A Year in Pictures

Last year, our family discovered how much fun it was to make a slideshow with our favourite photos from the previous year.

We did it again this year, and I have to say, putting music to your life makes it feel a bit like a movie, or maybe a musical, in which the sun is always shining, life is pretty awesome, and the music swells appropriately with the rise and fall of your emotions.

So here we go: the sunshiny version of 2012.

*As I’ve mentioned before, our friend Morgan is our favourite photographer ever, and many photos from this last year were taken by her. To check out more of her work, I highly recommend her Facebook album of her year in photos.:)

Here’s hoping 2013 is just as good as 2012 has been!

How was your New Year’s? Did you do anything memorable?

Best Sisters Forever

Anika started praying for a sister when she was two years old. She kept praying for three and a half years, and she never stopped believing that God would answer her prayers.

And then He did. I will never forget what it was like to call Anika from the hospital with the news that her baby sister had been born (and of course my mom captured the moment on camera!).

Anika just giggled. And kept giggling.

And now they giggle together.

They also fight a lot, the most popular reason being Kaylia’s large area of personal space, and Anika is forever getting in it, trying to hug and kiss her….while still refusing to share her toys. Things can get ugly at times.

But things can also be so beautiful, too.

One of the greatest joys of my life is watching our girls being sisters.

So, in honor of Kaylia’s birthday, I put together a little slideshow of Anika and Kaylia…

2011, You’ve Done Well

My friend once said that to instantly move her to tears, all it took was combining pictures and music.

That’s it.

It almost doesn’t matter what the pictures are of, you just put music to them, and you have magic. And I have a big lump in my throat.

I watched such a presentation a few weeks ago, and thought, “Life looks so perfect when it’s made into a slideshow…. I want a perfect life….. Let’s make a slideshow!”

Who knew it could be so easy? I sense a new tradition coming on….Pictures to music at the end of each year! Fun to watch, easy to do, fast transportation to a perfect life and a huge lump in my throat. Big wins, all around.

And it doesn’t hurt that 2011 has been a pretty great year to begin with.

Here’s our little recap:

 

The Culture of ‘Hot’

Yesterday, I asked Ben if he had read anything really great recently that I should pass on to all of you. Being the wonderful, helpful husband that he is, he immediately set up this little link :

Walt Mueller’s blog

Something to read and something to watch! Be sure to check out the video at the end – it’s extremely interesting and very disturbing. Actually, I felt slightly ill after watching it. It’s about how our culture is twisting the views of beauty and the need to be “hot”. Having an eight-year-old little girl who is speeding her way to the teenage years, I’m left feeling sober. And with much more to say about all of this.

But we’ll leave it with the video for today…

How do you feel about the way our culture has spread this message?

Picture From Our Weekend

So I don’t have all kinds of interesting pictures from our weekend, because our weekend pretty much looked the same the whole time – we sat around feeling sick.

We all had colds except for Anika (but she says her nose is starting to feel stuffed), so Saturday was spent trying to get the motivation to be somewhat productive. Ben did homework, and I did some housework and wiped Kaylia’s nose. Sometimes I think it would be interesting to count how many times I wipe her nose in a day. And sometimes I don’t think I could count that high. I am not a very big fan of snotty-nosed kids, so she gets her nose wiped extremely regularly. Fortunately for me, she’s good with it. When she sees the Kleenx, she leans her head towards me and gets into the ideal nose-wiping position.

Anika played outside for a long time in the afternoon, and I guess Kaylia was feeling kind of bored and wanting some attention, because she got up onto the couch with Ben, climbed onto his lap and got all settled.

On Sunday, Ben and Anika spent the day in Rennie, because there was a work day at the community centre, and I stayed home with Kaylia and wiped her nose. And watched home videos on the computer. This is her new thing. Whenever one of us sits down at the computer, she gets all excited and says, “Wee-o! Wee-o!” (Which is her way of saying “video”.) If we show her one, she says “Den!” (again) and “Moe!” (more) over and over and over and over…. And if we say video is all done, she gets quite upset.

So in honor of Kaylia’s new obsession, it is my goal to learn how to put videos onto my blog. Then you can watch all of her favorites, too.