Fall Happenings

Fall is here in Vancouver, as can be seen by the apple crop that has come in.  This year we have had a bumper crop of fuji apples, which are very sweet and juicy.

School started and in addition to home schooling, more of our kids go to school as well.  Eliana started taking classes at our local middle school.  She leaves to catch the bus every morning which comes around at 7:30am.  At school, she takes English, Social Studies, and Science and then comes home by 11:15am.

Gabe goes to school one day a week, so Monday is the day he has to get up early!

And Karina goes to school one day a week as well.  

Her bus comes even earlier at 7:15am!

And Xiao Yu goes to school every day.  He really enjoys it and has a good teacher.  For some reason, his bus picks him up across the street and many times, Lucky is out there with him.

Gabe is back in soccer, which is good because it gets some of his excess energy out.

He scored goals several times but his specialty is playing in the midfield.  He is great at gaining possession of the ball by stealing it from others and then making a super accurate pass to a teammate close to the goal.

At the end of the season, he got a certificate.  It's addresses to "Gabriel...aka Mr. Business".

Here is a team picture.

And here is a goofy version, and of course he is the monkey hanging off of the goal.

He recently got his second haircut during our two year long pandemic.  This time Elvin convinced him to go to a barber shop instead of doing it at home--which can take more than an hour instead of 15 minutes.

Much better!

When she has free time, Eliana can be found talking to her friends on the phone.  She's a teenager now and  I guess that's what teenagers do!

Gabe and Xiao Yu every once in a while play games together.  Here, Gabe taught Xiao what the various chess pieces do.

Xiao has started getting into puzzles.  These are puzzles that Emily got and Xiao Yu likes putting them together.

Here's a tougher one with multiple parrots to piece together!

Karina continues in her baking streak.  This time she is making molasses crinkles, which have dark molasses in them.

After they get rolled into balls, they get dipped into sugar.

The cookie dough is yummy of course.

And here they are...just out of the oven!

Gabe has started to bake as well...he decided one day to make monkey bread, which tastes similarly to cinnamon rolls.  First you make the dough and then let it rise.

After rising, Gabe rolled out the dough and then cut it into segments.

At this point, Karina started helping out by rolling the segments into little balls.

Then they formed an assembly line where they dipped the balls into butter then rolled them into a cinnamon and sugar mixture.

After a second rise in the pan, into the oven they went!

Here is the monkey bread after coming out of the oven and out of the pan!

And everything tastes yummier with icing.  This was super yummy!

And because of the rainy weather here, we decided to go with some friends to the local rock climbing gym.  All the kids enjoy climbing and, unlike Elvin, have no fear of heights.

They made up a game where they were speed climbing on a certain section of the wall up to about 12 feet high.  And they had us time them with a stopwatch.  At first, it took them about 15 seconds to go up and eventually they got it to about 6 seconds!

And so that's been our fall!