Holiday Musings from Teacher Ron

Oh, the weather outside is frightful,
But The Little Gym is sure delightful,
When the cold rains start to blow,
Come and tumble, swing, balance, and grow!

Have you listened to our new voicemail message yet? I spent about 45 minutes last Sunday morning composing it. The paragraph above is the first stanza -- sung to the tune of "Let is Snow." 

I've been meaning to do something fun to update our outgoing message and finally sat down and just did it.  Let me know what you think!  Call (503) 595-9702 to listen to it.

Yes, it's almost Christmas, a time to have fun, exchange gifts, and stress out.  My family celebrates Hanukkah and Christmas.  And when we find a fun Kwanzaa event, we'll often join in too. 

Personally, I'm not much into the planning aspect of the holidays.  I'm lucky that my wife, Marie, really wants to focus on the humanistic side of this time of the year.   Last year, we found a pretty cool tradition that we started incorporating into our family's traditions.  Each day of December, we do a simple ceremony after dinner.  We light candles of peace, hope, love, etc..,  say some kind of reading and discuss it, then we open up a tiny bag and pull out a tiny card that has an activity that we're to do the following day.  The other day was my son's "special day".  Marie took some time off from work and went to Blaise's school to have lunch with him.  Last night we found a local giving tree and purchased gifts for 2 children in need.   This morning we did a Super Secret Special Surprise -- we went to our children's classrooms at 7am and put a secret gift on the desk of each child.  

We bought a kit from Advent Bag & Box (http://www.adventbagandbox.com/) to do this.   (We have no affiliation with them.)  We didn't buy the acompanying book so we're winging it a little bit.  But this is a fun and mostly easy tradition to do.  Our kids calm down enough to do the ceremony and we haven't burned down the kitchen table yet.  Tonight we'll be doing "Advent" plus lighting our menorah.   Maybe we'll make some super-greasy potato pancakes (a la Grandma Esther's recipe). 

What traditions do you and your family have?  (And can we steal them for our family?)  :-)

For my next post, I'll let you know what The Little Gym is doing to prepare for the holidays, for Show Week, and for the upcoming Winter/Spring semester.

I'm looking for "Video Veg day".  Maybe it'll be one day this weekend?  Marie?

Happy Holidays,
  Ron and The Little Gym of Lake Oswego team