Benji has played the clarinet for several year and will continue to play into high school, but he is musically pretty flexible and was invited to try out saxophone for jazz band (his third band activity!). He's been practicing and he already sounds pretty good!
Benji's youth orchestra group (Evan's Orchestra) was invited to play a little concert of Christmas carols at the hotel. After the show, I made him take a picture in front of their giant tree:
We were so excited when Abby got into Dartmouth early decision, that we made her take a picture that night in her Dartmouth sweatshirt. And then we bought her a cake the next day when she was out with her friends:
They got to perform in the Performing Arts Center at Charlottesville High School. Benji is right up front in the clarinet section to the left:
Our friends Andrew and Cathy came over for dinner and gaming next Friday. They are very sweet (and also love video games), so they offered to come early so they would have a chance to play some Nintendo with Benji before dinner:
Benji's Stage Left play (Alice in Wonderland) is getting close to opening night (January 14th) and they had an all-day tech rehearsal on Saturday. Mr. Rod sent out some photos and I spotted Benji among them:
I did not take a ton of Hanukkah pictures, but snapped one or two of different activities on various nights. I wanted to catch gift opening this night because I knew Benji would be amused by his present:
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| Abby liked her present, too -- a nail polish organizer |
We postponed our big Hanukkah celebration a couple of days because the kids wanted to feel less rushed after Thanksgiving. Gammy was able to join us for night #3 and we had matzoh ball soup, latkes and doughnuts and sang songs after opening presents:
Kevin was determined to get our tree over the Thanksgiving weekend, but we struck out multiple times in Charlottesville. We went to our usual spot, only to find that the Boy Scouts are not selling trees this year. Our back-up spot, Kiwanis, is also not selling trees, and neither is the Albemarle Square lot closest to our house that typically benefits Meals on Wheels. We checked out a tree lot by the mall, but the trees were 3 times as much as we usually pay for them. We remembered that we had once gotten a tree out near Barboursville from a cute little farm/market that grows their own. We had tickets later in the weekend to see a play out that way, so we decided to make an afternoon of it. The Market at Grelen did not disappoint, with a good number of nice trees at "regular" prices and a sweet atmosphere:
From there, we drove the ten minutes back to Barboursville for this year's Four County Players' Christmas Show: The Its a Wonderful Life Radio Play. We all agreed we did not enjoy this one as much as past years' shows, but it was nice to see live theater again:
Power Grid is a ridiculously long and math-intense game that Benji loves but that we rarely have time to play. Since Abby had to be at CHS for most of the day on Saturday for an FTC build, we decided that would be the perfect time to break it out. It took all morning, but we had a lot of fun. Benji broke out his adding machine to help him and was pleased with the result:
As per our custom, we all got up to watch the entirety of the Macy's Day Parade (with a pigs in blankets snack at the midway point). This year, we had Thanksgiving PJs and the kids readily agreed to a picture at the conclusion of the parade, which quickly got silly:
We spent the rest of the afternoon cooking and then Gammy joined us for an early dinner with way too much food:
