Here's where Roseann slept in luxury during her stay...
Back at home, the girls and I managed the best we could while Roseann was away, and we did alright, but we did miss her an awful lot! We worked and played as usual... I hosted a game night with some friends and went to preschool with Evee as the parent helper, which is always fun.
When Roseann got back we worked a lot on the "Tale of the Sun and the Moon" video. Here it is again, in case you haven't seen it yet:
We went to the Christmas party at church, which Grandma Jean was in charge of the program for, so she roped me into performing "The Elephant Song" (with Evee leading the kids in the responses) and had Becca as one of a group of dolls singing "Are My Ears on Straight?" It was a nice night, and of course the girls were excited to meet up with Santa.
Performing at the Christmas party...
Becca as one of the dolls, with Gramma Jean directing to the left...
We got dumped on with snow and cold for quite a while here, which is unusual for this particular area. Well, when I say "dumped on", I mean about a foot or so... I must admit that since moving here from Buffalo (where we regularly got several feet of snow... one year we had eight feet of snow in one day!), I've become kind of a weather wimp.
We had a very enjoyable Christmas. Though we missed being away from so much of our family, we're always happy to be together. I particularly appreciated the music of Christmas this year... I only just realized that we had Sirius available the whole time through our Dish Network, so we put on a holiday music channel to listen to a lot, and I always felt joy to hear great songs like "Oh Holy Night", "Silent Night" and "Santa Baby". Evee was happy that Santa remembered to get her Thomas Train set, and he also provided Becca with a variety of nice stuff that she liked a lot.
Reindeer tracks?
The girls in some new costumes...
A paint-your-own clock that the girls made with Roseann...
and paint-your-own plates...
We celebrated Evee's fourth birthday a day early on December 30, and went out to a pizza place. She opened her presents and we played some arcade games together and ate some yummy pizza and cake. Gramma Jean came with us, and of course we wished her "happy birthday", too. Evee's middle name is "Jean", and we had picked the name "Evelyn Jean" for our next daughter back when Becca was born, so it was neat that the two of them share a birthday together on New Year's Eve.
There was a problem with the tire on our minivan, so I went to rent a car for us to drive up for First Night Spokane, but the "midsize" car was smaller than it seemed like it should be, and we couldn't all fit in there with my equipment, so I ended up going alone. I did four sets, the first two in a nice theater at the Convention Center and the second two at Mobius, which is a fun children's museum kind of place. The audiences were very receptive and it was a great event, as it has been the last four years, but it was also quite exhausting (as it has been the last four years), so I was relieved to get back to the hotel and hit the sack... though I was glad that I stayed up just past midnight, otherwise the fireworks would have woken me up.
At one of the Mobius shows...
So we've started 2009 with me working hard on finishing my next album, which we hope to have finished by the end of the month and released this spring. This album has been two years in the making (with a lot of long breaks and interruptions in between), so I'm really excited to finally get it out there and it's coming together very nicely.
Becca and Evee started taking swimming lessons twice a week and are doing well with that. Here's Evee showing off her new goggles...
We're actually scaling back a bit on the traveling and performing this year (we're planning a more significant tour for 2010), but we'll still be hitting a lot of the usual places and also some new places. Regardless, I'll keep up best I can with what we've got going on and where we are...
We wish you all a very happy 2009!
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