A Front Row Seat to Our Life!: Timbali Bag Give-Away!

 I am blogging this to enter a drawing for a Timbali bag :)

These super-cool bags are more than an accessory!

They are made by women in Swaziland, really really poor women.  These women then volunteer their time at feeding care points in Swaziland to feed thousands of orphans. Why are there so many orphans in Swaziland, you ask?

Well, Swaziland has the highest AIDS rate in the world and the average life-span is under 35.  You can imagine if all most of the adults 35 and older are dead---that leaves a tremendous amount of children that are without parents.  Many of these children are HIV+ as well.  Timbali Crafts was started to give these women an income as well as spiritual nourishment which is also passed on to the orphans they care for.  Here is their website:  Timbalicrafts.org

There is a tag on each purse.  On this tag, the lady who made the purse has written her name.  Most of the bios can be found on the Timbali Crafts website.

Christmas Pictures

I cannot thank Amanda Tonagel enough for our Christmas pictures.  She was a true sport, going out in the cold for a bit with us and taking amazing pictures.  She is such a blessing to us!  Wonderful photography at  http://atonagelphotography.blogspot.com/

Sad news

We are without a working camera right now :(  I will not slander the name of the brand, but I am very upset.  We bought our camera less than a year ago, and it worked fine for the first few months.  Then it would start eating through batteries, or so we thought.  It turns out that the batteries were fine, but the camera was not working properly.  So we sent it in and got a replacement.  Now we have had this one for a few months and it is doing the same thing.  It will shut off and tell us to replace the batteries even if there are brand new batteries in it.  Needless to say this is all very frustrating, especially right before our son's first Christmas.  So don't be expecting any pictures for a little while.  Hopefully we can get this taken care of very fast.

Smiley Boy

I had to post this picture of Oliver with that big grin and his little mohawk.  He is going to be 5 months in less than a week.  I feel a little like he is growing too fast for me to keep up with.  That's life, I guess.  Karissa is going to be 4 in 9 days.  It doesn't seem like that should be possible either.

Coniferous Advent

We made our own advent calendar this year.  I got the idea from a Family Fun article.  It was fun to make and did not take very much time.

Karissa wrote all the numbers (with a little help from me)

Karissa loved doing the numbers.  She traced the dots I made to form the numbers and then she cut them out, too :)

Here is the finished product.  We are proud of it.