Christmas Letter 2018

Merry Christmas friends and family far and near!!

I don't quite remember when last we wrote but a lot has happened. Our family has been on quite a rollercoaster for the past five years. But God is so good and has blessed us in so many ways. I miss writing these letters because I not only write them to share with you but also to keep years but I'm sure the younger two won't see it the same. I will try to catch you up as briefly as momentum or our children. I'm not sure that the oldest children will forget our roller coaster possible. So what has our rollercoaster ride been like? It started when Michael bravely took a leap of faith closing his mobile car repair service and went back to school. At first, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do but after a lot of prayers, we decided that a CNA program and eventually nursing program would be a great fit. Then the birth of Mary-Anne came with some anxiety and a 12 day stay in the hospital. Wow, we were so happy to have her home! That roller coaster came at the beginning of the pregnancy especially after the loss of Peter. Our Christmas letter that year asked our friends and family to help us financially get through the rough patch. The response was overwhelming and we can't thank our friends and family enough for that help! On January 1st, 2015 our family became homeless but here are two amazing blessings! Have you ever seen a community rally! Although we didn't have a home to go to our amazing community, with two good friends Becky and Rebecca as organizers, came to help us quickly pack us up to move all of our stuff into storage. The scene was amazing young ladies with moms packing boxes and cleaning and young men and dads throwing away things we didn't need, packing a truck several times, and filling our storage unit. It took a long time to pack and a whole day of running to storage but our amazing community did it! Seriously just like in the movies! Two amazing families welcomed our family of six to stay with them. Thank you so much to the Murphy family and the Szkoda family for putting up with our rambunctious crew! We finally found housing on Mary-Anne’s first birthday 8 months after the start of our journey! As you can imagine there were many other adventures with Michael and his schooling but the next most difficult year was 2017 when Adrianne lost her Grandmother then 9 months later her father to rapid lung cancer. Her father's death was sad and sudden but in the end beautiful because he had a priest come to baptize him and give him last rights, bedside conversion at it’s best! Thank you Fr. Marc! Once again dads friends, many if Adrianne’s brother’s friends and our friends helped us with the expense of dad's death. Please continue to pray for the soul of both Paul G. Bell and Lucille M. Voutour. All of our lives have ups and downs and we know we will continue to see those ups and downs in our lives but we are so grateful to now have an RN in our family!

Michael graduated as a nurse after long and hard 4 years of nursing school. We used St Joseph of Cupertino so many times and we know he interceded for Michael during many tests. He is now working full time as a nurse in a nursing home. He loves his work and now only fixes our cars. Yes, he still runs at least one race a year often coming in third place.

Adrianne is still homeschooling all the kids except Adriana. She runs the kids' homeschool 4-H club, Homeschool Homesteaders. She also runs the kids all over the county to participate in their many activities. A few years back she fell in love with Lilla Rose Flexi clips and started to sell them for a little extra income. This year she went to California with her friend, Erin, to the Lilla Rose convention. She occasionally takes time for herself and this year she took a second trip to New York with Anne to see the sad end of their favorite band, Third Day. As usual, Adrianne loves being mom, teacher and now support to Adriana schooling.

Adriana is 14, can you believe it. She has grown into a beautiful, confident, athletic, and very mature young lady. She has learned to be a leader through our 4-H club. She shows goats in the show ring and she is a great speaker. She loves basketball and enjoys running. She most recently challenged herself and her parents to enroll her in a local Catholic classical education school where she is a freshman. She struggles academically but she loves her new school and has taken on the challenge.

James is 10 and in 5th grade. He loves all things! He is a boy's boy but still our Sweet Baby James! He also challenges himself in so many ways. He seeks out challenges. He became an altar server for the traditional Tridentine Mass a few years ago. He is a Knight of the Altar. He serves with the true love of Our Lord. We pray for his vocation often. He feels a little tug towards priesthood but also being 10 and having a beautiful soul sees himself as a dad. Please join us in prayer for his vocation, prayer he seeks God's will. Since his sister left our homeschool 4-H club he has become the president. He also shows goats and chickens and recently gave up showing pigs. He plays soccer and basketball with all his heart. He loves to learn and absolutely has an engineering mind so he focuses a lot on the math and sciences. He also loves robotics and coding.

Thomas is 8 and in second grade. This past year on the Feast of Pentecost he made his first communion. The Holy Spirit was totally present. He has also joined James at the Knights of the Altar but has not yet started serving. He still has tons of energy. Is learning to read and truly has a love for books. He also loves to play with legos and create art. He loves to teach younger children so I can see his leadership growing. He tried his hand at showing pigs this year. He loves showing goats and chickens. I can see his maturity growing.

Mary-Anne our baby is four! She is growing. She has lots of spunk coming after Thomas. She has her brothers wrapped around her fingers and is still the best gift Adriana ever received. As the youngest, she knows her way around a youtube better than any of our other children at that age. She is cute as a button and loves to spend time with her great-aunt Denise. She has a natural love of animals especially goats and dogs. She interestingly loves to be home and I say that because we are generally not home. She loves school including are homeschool Co-op. We all wait and watch to see her character.

Adrianne also posts lots of our family Adventures on Facebook. If you are not already friends with her it is a fun way to watch our family grow, https://www.facebook.com/ajniall. We wish you the Merriest of Christmases and a Blessed New Year. God bless, Michael, Adrianne, Adriana, James, Thomas, and Mary-Anne Niall

Fun crazy family picture

Adriana and James with their show goats!

Bl. Pier Giorgio Fassati
St. Elizabeth of Hungry and
St. Martin of Tours

Thomas and James at
Thomas' First Communion

Third Day's goodbye tour with Anne!

Catalina Island Tour
with Lilla Rose and Erin

Mama loves goats too! 

Adriana's first day of High School
Trivium School

Niall Monkeys 

4-H Flexi Girls

                                       

Birthday Girls

                  

'Tis the Irish Season

The children are a quarter Irish (on daddy's side.)
 

 Early on in our homeschool journey we found Irish Step Dancing. Adriana has been dancing for four year. 


James and his dance partner and friend, Greta

This is James' second year dancing.  

 

Most likely Thomas will begin dancing next year. It is a lot of fun and daddy dances around the house with them.

James and Thomas with some friends. 

This is our dance season. We have a number of shows thought the year but most come around St. Patrick's day. We had 6 shows in two and half weeks. On top of the shows we add extra Irish Step classes to get ready for the shows.



Monica, Greta and James

Last night was our last show. It was a great season.

As always thank you Kathy and the Irish Rhythm School.    

Uniform

Simple, Kakhi bottoms and polo style collar shirts.

School is a challenge enough with having to fight about what we are going to wear. The fight between boys and girls are different. Boys want to well whatever they can get get there hands on clean or dirty.

Girls just take a long time to decide what they want to wear and if I disapprove it is war.  Not that she has a ton of clothes I disapprove of it is the way she wants to wear them.  It can be distracting for even me!

Doesn't she look cute!

I decided to take the fight out this year and just have a school time uniform. Yes I have the fight when we don't have school but it doesn't hinder our school start time.

James doesn't totally need a uniform except he is the bigger clothes fight.  Oh my some days!!  Now it is just like the easy Sunday, go put on your church clothes except I say school clothes.

She can wear jean or kakhi skirts.

Now to work on sitting up straight in class. It is always something isn't it? What do you think of homeschool uniforms?

Getting Dry

 

                                                                      photo by Adriana  (age almost 7) 

James and his best friend Leo drying off after playing in the sprinklers. 

When you ask James who his best friend is (not Mama but Adriana because she is all about best friends) he will tell you Leo.  Leo says James is his best friend but these to boys are funny.  James and Leo are like brothers, they love each other but even more they love to battle each other.  Leo is good at making James crazy and James is good at yelling about it.  They are two funny peas in a pod!

Two Stop Feast

We try to make a big deal out of the Feast Days for our children.  We want them to love the saints they were named for and celebrating the day helps them to love the saint and themselves!

 Side note: Believe it or not because our boys are James and Thomas many people ask if they were named after tank trains. I get most annoyed when good Catholics ask or even just say "like Thomas the tank engine," to which I usually reply no Saint Thomas Aquinas. I will admit that when Amanda was visiting I teased her that she had to name her new baby "Percy or Gordon or even Toby."  I said to her having four tank engine names in the family is so much more fun then having a "Joseph." Really we are excited Amanda and Brandon choose a great strong name like Joseph. Mama really almost cried when she heard his name not that they need our approval.

One Stop Fun's layout

Wow was that a side note.  So my point was, we don't name our children after tanker engines we name them for saints. Today the church celebrated St. James the Greater's Feast Day.  We have chosen this as James' patron and he can choose otherwise when he is an adult because there are tons of St. James'.

Mama and James having fun!!

Our tradition for Feast Days, or as some call them Names Days, we allow our children to choose dinner for the night and an outing for that day.  The outing can be something as simple a park, library, pond or something like an outing to the zoo or York Wild Animal Kingdom.  Adriana makes out best  because we have the same tradition for birthday as we have for Feast days and she has her Feast day and Birthday 4 day apart. 

James loves Thomas;
Thomas loves James
Brotherly Love!!

James choose to have pizza for dinner.  When I asked him on Friday it wasn't like he even had to think about it pizza flowed out of his mouth naturally unlike last year when his sister convinced him he wanted her favorite meal, kielbasa.

James choose pepperoni pizza and strawberry shortcake, yummy!!

His feast day outing was spent at One Stop Fun.  This is all the fun for Adriana, James and Thomas had at One Stop Fun.  We called this post Two Stop Feast because James had two stops One Stop Fun and home for a pizza dinner.

Adriana and James excited to be here and they are showing it!!

 

Adriana and James in the ball pit before we left

 Adriana is the flash of pink in  the left picture. She is in the balls on the right.

Thomas playing

Where is James?!?!

The Boys hanging together, Brotherly love: