End of 2025

As promised, the end of 2025!

In September, we took Elliott for his birthday on a tour of the Bingen-Rüdesheimer area.  A castle, a chairlift ride, a hike to a monument, and a Glockenspiel playing over our very yummy dinner.  He had Apfelstrudel for the first time, too.  It was a good day. 

 

 

 

Check out the name of this town.  Sometimes German makes us laugh.

 

 We went on a leaf walk and made leaf books.  We collected over twenty-five species!

 

This is my normal daily walk!  So beautiful! 

 

Snazzy dressers! 

 

Emma was trained in Salzburg, Austria at Schärf Coffee to be a barista in August.  She began working as a shift manager at a Christian ministry café nearby.  (Ian joined her in January of 2026.) Kathryn is continuing her work in housekeeping in the lodging on base.  David began working a part-time job in a food truck, where he is witnessing to his Muslim employer!  It's amazing to watch these young men and women grow up!

 

 Theater continues to be a good part of my older children's lives.  In September, David, Ian, and Daniel had roles in Puss and Boots.  Ian was the king, Daniel was Puss's owner, and David was, well................A man, duh!  At least Amanda was the name of his character.  This was played for a lot of laughs and does not signify anything else.  He is not an attractive woman!

 

And Brigit just likes to be dramatic.  She put on this outfit to be a doorman at a fancy apartment building. 

Also, there is a lot of gelato in our lives! I believe this picture was taken by Emma when she traveled to Spain and Greece with Niya and another friend.

 

Emma is also still singing with a very talented group called Vox Melodica.  Rob, pictured here, played the Spanish guitar for one of the ensembles in this concert. 

 

 

 Early October found us on our way to Croatia for Rob's cousin's wedding.  We passed through Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Italy on our travels.  

 

 Liechtenstein. I promised you we'd get here!

 

 Many of you have been praying for my mom, Kathryn, for the last year and a half. Thank you so much for those prayers.  She is currently very well.  She continues chemotherapy and will probably do so for the rest of her life.  She received a stem cell transplant from a donor here in Europe(!) which has only sort of "taken."  She is in good spirits and has asked me to thank you all for your prayers which she and my dad are very grateful for.  You can follow her Caring Bridge site here.

 

 Pumpkins in October!  Home and the botanical garden we belong to. 

 

 

In November we processed our chickens.  It was a hard day, but we are really glad that our children were able to experience caring for an animal from birth to death.  They helped each other through the emotions and found some toughness that they didn't know they had.  They saw what it takes to eat meat and learned some anatomy, too.  The picture below came during our eviscerating time.  Zoom in if you can.  Those are eggs in various stages of development, from read for a shell, to head-of-a-pin tiny that we found in one of our layers.  Very cool.

 

One of our favourite holidays here has been Sankt Martinstag, or Saint Martin's Day.  We celebrate with homemade lanterns and parade, singing, through the town, following a child dressed as St. Martin on  a horse.  In our town, it's a real horse. There's a bonfire and hot drinks and pretzels in the town square afterward.  Lovely.

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The end of No-Shave November 

St. Nicholas Day!  So many presents; we are blessed!

 

The school had a Christmas play and, again, Tessa had a large part.  She's the littlest star there in the first picture.  So many lines memorized in German!! 

Brigit was a little star in the chorus, too.  She did great!

 

 

 Just before Christmas, Rob and I headed to Heidelberg and Nürnberg for their Christmas markets.

 

 

 

We managed to have a delightful Advent and wait until the weekend before Christmas to cut down our Christmas trees.   Yes, trees, plural.  We have so many ornaments that it takes three regular trees or one jumbo one to put them all up!  It's nice though, because I would live with trees in the house all year if I could.  

The youngest five were in the local Krippenspiel again.  That's a Nativity play for my American friends!  Elliott narrated, Isaac and Brigit were shepherds, Tessa was Mary, and Callum is the little sheep there on the end!  Again with the memorized German lines.  So proud of all of them!

 

Okay, I'm going to be real with you all right now.  Parenting is the best and having a big family has been almost nothing but a gift to Rob and me.  Almost.  I'm going to share the biggest sacrifice that comes with having a big family.  Christmas and Easter pictures.  Two times a year I ask my family to look decent - match even - for pictures at services.  But the bigger my family gets, the harder it is to get everyone looking nice, not grumpy about the color scheme chosen, and not closing their eyes or doing something else weird in the photo.  It's a place of deep suffering for me. 😖. With that being said, here are this year's Christmas pictures.  Keep in mind that it's after dinnertime and almost bedtime and our photographer decided that crouching down to get us all in the picture was the best angle...  I promise, we're much better-looking in real life.  Sort of.  Nah, this is pretty real.

And it snowed Christmas Eve!  What a treat!

Jesus birthday cake, thanks to Emma.

School break walk up to the frog pond to walk on the ice.  This is one of our favourite local spots.

 

 

Gingerbread house making 

 

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It was a good year and we are grateful.  About this time we got orders for Omaha and began to rejoice and plan for our return stateside.  Tune in tomorrow for the next installment of the Rose Family Adventures!