Christmas Tuesday: DeYoung Christmas day 2

 I forgot to mention it on the day my family arrived, but at one point Evelyn and JJ played their recital pieces.  They were excellent.  And then Joshua played through his whole Christmas book. :D  It was cute, but a few details to make it more interesting.  1) He had a play list.  2) He had been practicing these songs for a while.  He had a plan of giving a performance.  3) The songs were on the easier side for him, but it worked well because he was able to figure most of them out himself.  I think he decided to bring the book to piano lessons, but most of it was just him.

So, back to Tuesday.

The kids horsed around in the morning.  It is nice not to have to have someone on child-duty anymore.

Aunt C came over.  Dad had a picture of the old farmstead and so that brought out some stories.  The garden was farther away from the house than I would have guessed.  It was (mainly) beans, tomatoes, and strawberries.  Although it was primarily a dairy farm, there were also some pigs and chickens.  The milk was stored in the milk house next to the barn and someone came to get it regularly.  (I feel like it was every day, but I'm not sure on that now.)  Julie would line up the calves and play with them.  I think they moved into the city when Mom was in middle school -ish.  Before high school for sure, due to logistics of getting to Muskegon.

We had lunch and then nap time.  We were going to Hope to work on a project, so when my alarm went off I came out and found a lot of people had joined me in nap time.

Our project of the year was wind-up cars.  Dad found them in his office as he was cleaning it out.  It was a nice project because it required the use of the bandsaw and drill press and the kids were old enough of use the tools by themselves (but with supervision!).

The cars worked ok.  They moved down the hallway, but for the amount of effort needed to wind them up they didn't move very far.

There was the annual "run to the end of the hallway and back" run too, going on for at least 35 years.

When we got home Pat had already gotten there.  (Cars took a bit longer than I expected, so she had been there for a while.)  So she and Ben got out our most complicated game, some wine, and she learned a few key words so that they could tease us.

Dad made spaghetti for dinner - it was lovely not having to cook.  Isaac still went to rock climbing practice, so Nathan and I went to pick him up and watched him climb a few routes.  The other kids watched a movie and had popcorn.