Remembering to Grab the Camera!

This was an "Impromtu" Family Piano Night with our boys on Sunday night! They were so badly wanting Daddy to teach them "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" but it turned into a night of Duets of Chopsticks! They were very cute!

I was taking some random pictures over the last few days, because I've suddenly realized that I've sucked at taking any for a long while. So I was trying to remind myself to grab the camera more often.

The big boys are enjoying school to the best they can right now. Joshua is in Grade 5 and finding it a lot of "structure" and "homework" which in my eyes is a good thing, but for him, not so much! LOL Jakey is LOVING his teacher and really enjoying getting the hang of reading. He so does not understand why he can't just pick up one of his older brothers chapter books and just read it himself....but he really is getting there, I'm sure by winter time he'll be reading smoothly.

Luke is quite the little fireball of energy these days. He's TWO....and boy is he TWO!!!! lol Everything about him is two, he yells large, he plays large and he actually loves large!!! Everything is big in his life!!!! Speaking of big, wait until you get a grasp of how big this kid has gotten too, he's grown so much recently. He's now into a Toddler size 10 shoe (just to give you a comparison, his 5 year old friend Matt wears a toddler 13 and his friend Erin, the same age is in a toddle size 5!!! LOL)! He's stretching taller and taller and I'm really getting worried that I spent the past 2 weekends finding, washing and putting away all the Size 2 winter clothes, all to realize that I think he might be inching fast towards a size 3!!!

Todd is quite busy with work these days as well. We don't see very much of his the last little while as he's also entered another University course. That'll be for the next 4 weeks...so busy busy hubby for a while! We both can't wait for it to be overwith! Todd and I are looking forward to the end of November, because I took the American Thanksgiving weekend off of work, so that we can send out kids to school and get a couple days together to do something! Not sure what it'll be yet, but we'll plan something.

I have been busy with the kids, the part time little girl I have has been coming more often then she used to, so it's been busy and I'm liking it. We spend as much time visiting the drop in centre as we can, the kids love the different toys and I love visiting with other home care providers.

I have also been doing a bunch of computer work for a non-profit organization and I'm LOVING learning some website design tools. That's been exciting! I can't wait to take a real course on that stuff, Todd has me signed up for 2 online courses, I just need some quiet time (not plentiful around here! LOL) to complete them!

MOPS is also crazy busy right now, although we had a GREAT meeting this past Friday about a subject I was so nervous about talking about, because I was scared the Mom's would go home depressed, but in turn, God had a hand on our meeting and it just went FABULOUS!!! My favourite moment was the quiet Moms shared their life's stories with each other and there was so much honesty and support in that room that is just felt so cozy and warm....it was great! We ended the meeting with making one of the coolest crafts we've ever done. Janis had us make Ribbon Fobs and they were so much fun!

Anyway, I wanted to show you some recent cute pics of the kids....so here they are!

They were fresh out of the Bath/Shower!

Lukey was playing "Superman" on his big brother.

Brothers loving each other! It was very sweet....Lukey kept saying "Buba's Turn, now Osh's Turn!" They played this game for quite a while, surprisingly enough the big boys let Luke do it too!

Back to School

Well as usual it's been forever since my last update, but alas, I have a reason to post something again.

My boys have gotten back into the grove of things and are now back in school. Joshua is in Grade 5 this year and Jacob is in Grade 2. They both have fabulous teachers, they are happy with them and so far, they are enjoying the children in their classes too, which makes things a little better for me as well...I worry so much about that kind of stuff.

We have recently moved the boys' bedrooms around and Joshua has his own room again, he's THRILLED over that development. Jake is now sharing with Lucas and I have to say that it's working out way better than I could have imagined. Luke is thrilled to have someone else in his room and Jake is taking "ownership" of his new space. We went in to check on them the other morning and Luke was fast asleep in his brother's arms cuddling together in Jake's bed. It was so cute! Apparently Luke had woken in the night and we didn't hear him (oopps...bit of parent guilt there) and so Jake got up, took him out of the crib, put him in his bed and they both went back to sleep! What an amazing big brother Jake is being!

We had a very busy summer this year, the first half of the summer was working for and with Brooke for her wedding, that was so much fun! Lots and lots of work, but I really enjoyed doing what I was doing...so that was great. The wedding turned out great, with only a glitch here and there, which was great, nothing major. Luke looked absolutely adorable in his little tuxedo. Although he never did walk down the aisle like he was supposed to, both he and Tori stole the show!

The other half of my summer was learning how to tent camp with my boys! We took two really nice vacations...one was with a group of 6 moms and 20 children to Camper's Cove Camp Ground and that was a blast. The other was our "family" vacation and that was at Bingeman's Water/Sports Park and we camped there for 4 days 3 nights and had so much fun! Todd actually loved camping! I was so happy that he really liked it, the boys of course liked it, except for the part that we almost froze to death the first night, we fixed that fast with a quick trip to Walmart for a space heater then we didn't need it the other two nights..isn't that ironic!!! LOL

With the kids back in school again and MOPS starting up again next week, I'm sure things will fall into a "normal" pace again soon, I hope! I'm looking forward to a little more of a quiet fall season!

We'll be going to our annual Family Apple Picking next week....I'll post pics from that soon!

Anyway, hope everyone had a great summer like we did!

It's been a nice quiet January so far!

We decided to let Lukey try feeding himself with a spoon the other night! Well.....this is how our experiment went....yogurt and applesauce......oh boy........
Then it was bath time for Lukey baby!!! He's much cuter with his little faux hawk!!! LOL

Hi Everyone;

I don't have a lot to post, but thought I would put a few recent pics up of the boys! We've been doing well. It's been bitterly cold here lately, lots of snow (well....lots for this area anyway....not for most who are used to it) and we've been pretty much just hunkerin' down inside for the past few weeks....only going out if we really have to!

The boys are back to school, Jake is doing very well with his reading skills, he should be reading smoothly by June...we're excited about his hard work in this area. Joshua is busy working on his speech....it's the first "real" speech he's had to do right from the beginning to the end. This year's topic is "Why I love Camp Kintail"...so he's having a blast doing that one. I'm hopeful he'll learn it well and want to tell the staff about it this summer. Speeches have never been my thing, I always hated doing them, so Todd has taken over this homework project, while Jake and I work on his "Seasons" project and continue to work on his reading....so far he's read me 22 books by himself in the month of January, since he's been back in school....not bad for two weeks of work!

Hope everyone is well in this new year! Looking forward to what February has to bring us!

Lots of love:

The Beneteau Family

xxxooo

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We had a very nice and very busy holiday season! We had many things to do and many friends and family to celebrate with! We started out our holiday with going to our annual Christmas tree cutting place with the McAuley family! We always have fun hunting down the perfect tree. This year, the boys won against their Mommy for what we thought was the "perfect" tree and we got totally Griswald-ed and ended up having to cut a tonne of branches off the bottom and even 6" off the top! It ended up being a very nice tree and lasted until just a couple days ago when we finally got rid of it.

I hope that you all had a great holiday as well. I thought I'd post a few pics from the holidays for you to see the boys during the Christmas season. We also had a nice small celebration for New Year's Eve with a couple friends too, Lukey was adorable!

So here's to a very happy 2008, let's hope things go well for all of our friends and family this year!

Happy New Year to all of you!

Lots of love:

Kim, Todd, Joshua, Jacob and Lucas

xxoo

Here are my kiddos, very INTO the Christmas spirit!

And Our New Year's Baby!

Merry CHRISTmas Everyone!

I just wanted to say Merry Christmas to all of you EARLY this year! Todd and I are finding that December's calander just gets so full so fast that sometimes important things get forgotten. I'm sure yours does as well, so I thought that maybe you could use a little Merry Christmas right now! Isn't December nuts? It gets so full of trying to find time to do "special things" with the kids, the decorations, the concerts, the parties, not to mention all the list making, shopping and wrapping you have to accomplish!!! I'm trying to make my list, but it doesn't seem to be going so smoothly this year! LOL


I started my holiday festivities with a trip over to Frankenmuth, MI with Heather and our very favourite thing there was their play on how important it is to remember that this HOLIDAY SEASON comes for a very good reason and our society has come to forget that! All of this STUFF can easily cloud our real vision of the holiday! When we went to Broner's Christmas store (holy moly, 27 acres of Christmas stuff....totally amazing!) they sold a gold "cause" ribbon that states simply "Just say Merry CHRISTmas!" We laughed so hard at that!! It's so true! Forget all this stuff about "Happy Holidays!" or "Season's Greetings!" NONE OF US would have this time off school or work, had it not been for Jesus' birth!!! My new favourite Christina children's band is a group called "Go Fish" and they sing a song called "Christmas with a Capital C" and I love this song soooo much (look it up online, it's everywhere. Try this link on youtube, some of the graphics aren't things I necessarily agree with, but the song is awesome.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQhfeU3I0 ), listen to that song and see what things stick out in your mind! It's a very funny song! (there is one line I don't agree with, but overall, the song is great, so is their other music for kids, they have a song called "Jammie Time" that my kids LOVE! Check them out at www.gofishguys.com Their tag line cracks me up "Great music for kids that won't drive the parents BONKERS! Haha!!!) So the way I see it, is lets us as Christians celebrate our holiday and be proud to express it! So in this time of preparing, I challenge each of you out there to wish EVERYONE a "Merry CHRISTmas!", let's not forget why we really have all this "fun" stuff to do!


Yeah I know, this sounds a bit like a sermon (I suppose I just have been listening well lately! LOL), but it honestly is what keeps coming up for me this CHRISTmas season! So I thought I'd be one of the first to wish you all a very Merry CHRISTmas!!! Enjoy it! All of it! Every little piece of torn up paper that represented hours of wrapping, every single shove in lines for those 'oh so importnant toys, they MUST HAVE or they'll die!' (hehe!), and most importantly every one of the smiles and hugs your kids will give you when they realize that they are loved soooo much!!!



MERRY CHRISTMAS to you and your family from the Beneteau family!!!

Halloween at the Beneteau's

Hi Everyone,

It's past Halloween now, but I'm just getting to posting our pictures now. This was the very first year that we didn't have all of our boys going as complementing costumes, it was kind of a bummer to me, but we did come up with some awesome ideas, just nothing 9 year old and a 6 year old boys would agree too!! LOL I thought it was be awesome for them to go as a Rock, Paper, Scissors Championshiop, since that was what they were always so excited about with camp, but alas, noone wanted to be the ROCK! Hahaha!!! Todd's fav idea was for the three boys to go as "Loose Change" and make each one a quarter, dime and a nickel. Then his theory was that we'd make a statement when someone asked us where the penny was, we'd just say we decided to cancel the Canadian penny! hehe!!! However, I didn't really want to make another statement with our costumes this year and more importantly didn't want to go as a PIGgy Bank when I'm working so hard at dieting!!! LOLOLOL!!!!

Anyway, the boys' picked out their own costumes again this year and they decided to go as iPods. The costumes turned out great and I sure wish I would have video taped it to show you, because we even hooked up our two little shuffle ipods to speakers and attached them to the costume so it was playing music the whole night. That part was amazing, they were so cute! Then what to do with little Luke....Todd suggested he could go as the Shuffle, but I wasn't so sure. :-) We ended up going with him in a little frog suit, with a crown on his head and a sign on his chest that said "Prince Charming - Kisses 25 cents"! He was too cute!!! He loved his costume so much, when I put it on him, he just began to strut his stuff around the culdesac....too cute! The only part he hated was the actual Kissing Booth I made for him to stand in (and us to hold over him), he must have thought he'd loose his mobility or something, it was so funny! He'd scream with it on and laugh hysterically when he was free in his frog suit....so we adjusted the costume and moved on without the booth!!! Whatever works when you're 1!!!

The boys had a great time, it was a little weird trick-or-treating in the daylight to do our street, but we had to start by 5:30 in order to get to Baby Nick's house and then over to Aunt Vicky and Uncle Kevin's. That's where we have our Trick-or-treating party each year. It was fun to see Bailey in his little Pumpkin costume. If Vicky emails one to me, I'll post it here too. He was very cute and the boys absolutely love to play with him....they treat him like he really is their real baby cousin! LOL

So here are a couple of pictures, but I am working on putting a link on here to all of our pics, some of them just cracked me up, especially Luke's face when he first discovers that Halloween and putting this silly costume on meant getting candy dropped into his bucket!! I wished I could have frozen that look on his face into my memory forever! He was too cute!

I'm hoping that this link works so that you can click on it to see a short slideshow of the rest of our Halloween night!

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I absolutely had to show you what my sister dressed up as this year! It totally cracked me up....I'm so glad she did it, cause it was hysterical. Although she wouldn't wear the sign out trick-or-treating because she was afraid of offending someone! Great idea Brooke!

And then Tori went as an angel. She was too cute! She made sure Luke was taken care of and when Luke wasn't with her, she chased after the big boys!


So they went as a Devil, and Angel and God! I was proud of that theme costume idea! Good job Brooke!

Posting an update, as per request of being "sick" of the piano pics!!! LOL

(***Editing Note*** First of all I'd like to say that this blog is totally acting up on me! I can't seem to get it to do what I want and the pics are all weird shapes and sizes, sorry about that, I'll read up on what I did wrong and next time I post, hopefully it'll go a bit smoother.)

Well....as for the kids, there's not a terrible lot to post. Joshua and Jacob have seemed to settle well into their new school. Jacob REALLY loves his new teacher....he got a boy teacher and exclaimed to us the first night of school "Mommy, Mommy, I prayed and prayed that God would send me a boy teacher and HE DID!!!" That was so cute.

Joshua has a lovely teacher as well, Mrs. Doberich, he remembers her name by saying "Do be rich!" seems to make him laugh...he's such an entrepreneur already, isn't he? Anyway, he's making lots of friends, mostly with Grade 5 boys though, because of his friend from church, Ben, who is one year older than him. Josh is in a 4/5 split class, which doesn't thrill me, but we had that choice or a 3/4 split as they didn't have enough students in the English track to make a full Grade 4....the only part of switching them from the private school that I've been totally sad about is that he got put into a portable in a BRAND NEW Billion$$ school building....that part really sucked....but I trust the principal there, I really like him, he's a Christian and has very good values....so we'll see where the year takes us. His teacher has already started sending notes home about his inability to pay attention fully, so I know something is up, but it remains to be seen where it takes us this time around. That is my number 1 prayer for Josh this year, that we can find a way, HIS way of learning and make his schooling experience what he needs it to be so that he enjoys school again...he's not enjoyed it since Grade 1....oh for Mrs. Johnson to be back again!!! LOL She was amazing!

Lucas is growing and growing and growing....out of every last pair of shoes we own for him....so that's what I'm off to do sometime today....get the boy another pair of shoes....he's 16 months old and I'll be buying him a size 6 shoe!!! Crazy! Although, if he continues like his brothers did, this fact should NEVER surprise me! Joshua is almost 9 years old and he's wearing a men's size 7 shoe and Jake just turned 6 and is wearing a boy's size 4.....!!! Big feet in my family! One day, they'll eat us out of house and home, but for now, thank God that's not a problem! LOL Up at the top, you'll find a very funny picture of him "signing" his little heart out....oh for video of this! It was so funny listening to him humming his song and bopping is butt up and down, dancing away! Too cute!!!

I just got home from a MOPS Convention in Orlando, FL and had the time of my life!!! It is the 3rd convention I've been to (2 of the others were held in Nashville, TN) and this one seemed to really develope my Christian characteristics and leadership skills to a whole other level. I really had so much fun! We were so blessed to be able to bring 12 ladies in leadership from our MOPS group, we had 6 steering members, 3 mentor moms and 3 table leaders. The part I truly enjoyed the most was watching the women of this group, that have not yet been to an International event, see the impact that MOPS is making on the world. MOPS has a new tag line to go along with their new logo this year and it's "Better Moms Make a Better World"!!! Isn't that so true??? Society as a whole do not understand fully the impact that Moms have on this world as a whole.....in our homes, in our children's hearts, on our planet as a whole! Better Moms truly do make a Better World!!! This tag line will forever stand out in my mind! It's not to diminish the importance of Dads, they too make a world of difference, but when we focus on the Mom's of the world as a mission, we see the good and amazing work that God is doing in so many millions of families! Can you tell I'm totally pumped up for MOPS again? It truly is an amazing network of women, strong women, women from every walk of life and faith and background. It doesn't matter if you are a working mom, stay at home mom, single, married, teen, adopted, whatever your race or ethnic background, MOPS has a place for you! My prayer is that God works hard in Canada this year, to spread the wonderful word of MOPS throughout our wonderful country! There is no reason that with the size of Canada, we are stuck at less than a 100 MOPS groups around....and they are mostly just in BC and Ontario. There are so many families out there that could benefit from this amazing group! If you ever wanted more information about this group go to this website and you can find out about it's history, it's mission and how to get a MOPS group started in your area.... http://www.mops.org/

Ok, now that I made a big deal about MOPS, I'd love to show you some currect pics...(however, I can't seem to get the blog to behave properly, so all of the pics are up at the top! Sorry about that!)

The funniest of them all is this weekend (Thanksgiving Weekend) the boys yelled out "Hey Mom, we have something to show you!" I totally didn't expect it to be the big boy putting the baby on a dog leash!!! Man it was funny! Luke absolutely loved it, as did the big two of course, they took Luke-doggy on several walks around the house, giggling the entire time!!! Who knew, in MY household, this would ever happen!!! LOL (btw....it was a toy dog leash from Build a Bear, in Seattle, they built two husky dogs as their treat!)

Then I also thought I'd throw in their first day of school pics too, since I was a bad Mommy and didn't post them when I should have!

I'll even try to find some pics of convention to share with you too, but NOT the nasty blackmail pic that Teri-Lynn took!!! Yuck!!! It was aweful!!! Who needs to see me snorin' logs while they are bouncin' on the bed tryin' to wake me up!! Yuck!!! LOL

I hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving weekend!