3rd Sunday in Advent: My Birthday!

Today we celebrate the 3rd Sunday in Advent as well as my 45th birthday! How did I get so old? I remember as a child calculating how old I would be when 1999 turned into 2000 (38) and thinking that was so old! Well, seven years have gone by since then. I haven't decided whether having kids later in my life has kept me young or given me more gray hair!

The day started with church, the last two of four services where the Worship Arts Team presented A Christmas Tale. More on that in a further post. After church, we had lunch at this wonderful local (Ocala, FL) Italian restaurant, Bella Luna.

We have eaten there before several times for dinner. But they have a brunch on Sundays from 11:00-3:00, and I have wanted to try that for probably five years. It was wonderful! We had reservations, so we didn't wait to be seated, and because it was a brunch, we didn't wait to eat--always a great thing for Carys. I got a great pair of Mary Jane Crocs from my kids. Greg gave me a new Palm Tungsten e2. Yippee! My Palm was not holding a charge for very long anymore, and I was losing my patience with it. He got a hard case for free with the Palm, which is also great considering the number of times I've dropped mine in the grocery store. I also got a $25 I-Tunes gift card from him. Poor thing has to shop for me twice in the month of December. He has a tough job!

As for Advent, we're managing to keep up with our reading in Jotham's Journey, usually by reading two or three nights at a time. We miss so many nights every week because of Civil Air Patrol and church.

Carys helped open the gift for this Sunday, as usual, but it really wasn't for her.


It WAS a HUGE hit with everyone else, even though Chase is pouting about something in this picture.


It was a box filled with the latest Murderous Maths books which we hadn't yet purchased. There were also two books by the same author, Kjartan Poskitt, that are "just for fun" books: Urgum the Axeman and Urgum and the Seat of Flames.


I was first turned on to these books by a friend on my homeschool loop who is an "expert" (in my opinion) on teaching kids math using living books. She now has her own website all about this topic. When we first bought them, you couldn't get them in the US. The shipping from Amazon UK was more than the cost of the books themselves. BUT I had a dear friend from church who was a flight attendant with Delta and who often flew to London. I gave her a list, and she picked up all the books she could find in a bookstore there! They were very precious to us! Now, you can get these from Amazon.com, so it's much easier for anybody to pick them up. Needless to say, the Meahl children higly recommend them!