Cameron is our super speller

Today was the final of the Cielo Azul Elementary School's First Annual Spelling Bee.

One child from each of the 3rd, 4th and 5th grade classes in the school competed to be in the finals several weeks ago and Cameron made it through from his class qualifier.

In all, 20 kids competed over several rounds, each taking turns to spell words from a list which had been given to them about 4 weeks ago.

Cameron worked hard with Genevieve and I over the last week to learn the word list and was all ready for the competition today.

I think in the end, Genevieve was way more nervous than Cameron was. But as Genevieve's Mum, Jane, said "There is some sort of sweet justice in Genevieve having to go through this" since Genevieve was often involved in these types of things at school as a kid and put her Mum in this very same situation on many occasions! LOL!

Cameron took his time, concentrated and ended up in 3rd place in the whole school!!!!

We are all very proud of him and he is even more proud of himself.

Granny's sweaters

Kenny's Mum sends lots of beautiful hand-knitted clothes from Scotland.

Here are a few photos of Mackenzie & Scarlett in the latest delivery for the winter.

More Snow!

We had some decent snowfall yesterday and school was cancelled......so out we all got wrapped up in our snow gear and went to build snowmen and have snowball fights!

As you can see, Cameron took advantage of anyone not being alert or ready to ensure they got well and truely "snowed"

Mac was super cute in her new snow suit which we got last year but she has not had a chance to use yet. She loved it. This is the first year she has been big enough to go out and enjoy the snow and loved every minute. She helped us all build a snowman and kept on fixing him up long after we had all moved on to play other games in the snow.

After about 2hrs outside we were all feeling the cold a bit and headed indoors to warm up. Dayne from next door was with us for the day since his Mum and Dad were working and school was cancelled. Once we all got warmed back up we decided to make and decorate some Christmas cookies. I think as much frosting and sprinkles ended up on or inside the kids than on the cookies, but they all had fun and it only took about an hour to clean up the kitchen after them!

It looks like the schools will be back tomorrow........

...as Cameron says it "Awwwhh Man"

Scarlett has arrived!

On Wednesday 10th December 2008, the Black family became just a wee bit bigger!

Well, 7lb, 10oz and 21" bigger to be exact, as we welcomed the arrival of:

Miss Scarlett Isobel Black

She was born at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, NM at 04:00. Genevieve and Scarlett are both doing great and the rest of us are just excited about our newest little addition.

Click here for a slide show of all these photos and more

The first snow of winter

This morning we had the first snow of winter.

Mackenzie was VERY excited and wanted to go out and play as soon as she woke up. We convinced her to wait until she had got some breakfast and had got changed out of her PJ's before she went out though.

There was not much snow, but just enough for her to throw it about and get herself cold in 15-20 minutes that she wanted to come inside and warm up by the fire.

Can't wait till we get a decent snowfall and she can really enjoy it.