Work conference with kids in tow

I simply don't want to lose these photos, so I'm posting them here.  Directly after our time in Portugal, we had a three day work conference in the mountains.  (By directly, I mean directly.  Our flight from Lisbon was delayed a few hours, which meant we were a couple hours late for the conference!)

We'd been traveling all day, and Eva simply did not want to fall asleep on the trainride into the mountains.

You know it's a good hotel for kids when they make animal faces out of the morning pastries!

Bad blurry picture, I know.  But this guy is the best.  A colleague's son, at least four years older than Nathanael, if not more.  Nathanael adores him.  And that means, so does Eva.  I tried to capture it in this picture.  He slowly walked Eva down the stairs to dinner, listening patiently while Nathanael ran circles around them, talking nonstop. :)

Lastly, Eva fell in love with mothering this little doll.  It was just one of the toys in the hotel's play area for kids, but she was completely enamored.

Christmas at home in Vienna this year was stretched out over the month of December.

Firstly of course, right after Thanksgiving, we decorated our tree!

And tree decorating means our traditional ginger cookies and hot apple cider!

The honorable role of placing the tree topper:

Brother was busy meticulously decorating the felt tree.

Hard at work

Admiring our work

Gregory may have redistributed all of the ornaments after the kids went to bed...

We decided to buy a tree for our new Jesse Tree ornaments this year, which we LOVE!  They were laser printed by dear friends in Turkey!

And we ended our special decorating with our favorite homemade pizza assembly!

Nathanael's school doesn't have a big indoor location for gatherings, so we had the Christmas program in the courtyard!  Brrrrr!  Here is Nathanael's class preparing to sing some Christmas carols.  Of course, Eva was right in the middle in her light gray coat.

The kids opened their stockings from Saint Nicholas on the traditional St. Nicholas Day in Austria.


We opened family Christmas gifts early this year, since we knew we'd be away for Christmas.  Nathanael was excited about his box of Legos and Eva her stethoscope and Elsa skirt.

And we had a mini end-of-year celebration with Nathanael and his school buddy, Bemitha.  We hang out together on Wednesday afternoons between the end of school at noon and football practice a bit later (soccer).