November

November was filled with home renovations, family gatherings, and busyness.

We had a late Thanksgiving with my mom's side of the family in Wasaga Beach. I finished my Christmas shopping and we celebrated the first of our family Christmas' at our house with my family before my mom left for Florida for the winter. We finally did a ton of work in our kitchen and have all new appliances, new flooring, a new faucet, refaced cabinets, and new track lighting over the preparation area. We also switched our dining room to our family room and are now using our combined living room/dining room as a larger family room space. The house is finally starting to feel more like home after 4.5 years!

Volunteer activities took up a lot of my time in November. For one of my activities, I took the afternoon off work and attended an alumni/student networking event at the university where I did my undergraduate degree. I loved being back on campus (so nostalgic!) and speaking with all the students who are in the same program I took. The very next week I attended another alumni event held in Toronto geared toward women and leadership in careers. I had the opportunity to meet many astounding women at the event and left feeling so inspired. Until recently, I had never really engaged much with the Alumni community, but I'm very happy I did. I'm actually a graduate of two universities but preferred my undergraduate experience to my graduate experience and feel far more of a connection there. If you went to college or university, are you at all involved with the alumni association?

We attended parent-teacher interviews for both boys and were delighted to hear that they are doing very well academically. We were especially proud of our biggest guy who up until this year was quite behind in reading and has made such significant strides, he is at the appropriate level now! We've really been trying at home to find reading materials that interest him by letting him choose materials from the Scholastic book order at school and getting a variety of books from the second hand store to try out different series.

Noah also learned to scooter (in the house) and it has been the cutest thing ever! We had our first little bit of snow too but so far none has stuck around which is a bummer because this year we bought passes to the ski hill!

A few from November.. though I didn't take many since my phone camera is so terrible now: