Christmas Greetings!

Greetings and Happy Holidays to all of our friends and family!! We hope that you are enjoying a special time with all of your loved ones. In recent years we have enjoyed making our own Christmas cards but this year we've tried this new venue! It's free and it's fun. Instead of spending money on the purchase of cards and postage we made a small business loan through KIVA. This is a nonprofit group that helps individuals and families (primarily in poorer countries) start their own businesses. These are generally people that would be ineligible for loans from banks. We're really excited to find out what our "Christmas Card money" can do!

If you are interested in finding out about the organization click on the icon below, in the right column on this page. If you would like to find out about the family that we sponsored you can read about them below and then also on the KIVA website. Remember, you didn't get a Christmas card in the mail this year but, in a round about way, you helped us give a great gift! We'll be posting updates on them in the future, if possible.

We send our warmest wishes and we hope for peace in the coming days.
Merry Christmas with love
from
René, Ahna, Selena and Xavier

A Thoroughly BISHOP Thanksgiving

It was a quiet Thanksgiving day at the Bishop residence in my hometown Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. There was no extended family, no long extensive tables nor elbows in the stomach at "eat time." Grandma only opened the oven 2 times to look at the turkey. The food was excellent!!

Selena and her cousins Kathryn, Jeffrey and Kyle

Selena and Grandpa Bishop

(Kathryn's hand in motion) Grandpa, Jim and Grandma

After the food the desserts and the dishes, we settled down with the computers to create a FUN house (below). We laughed so hard at our images that we almost cried. Grandma thought it was one of the best recent inventions.

Here is one of the best photos of the day, it is of Jim. What a hair-do!
However, voted the very best photo of all in our FUN HOUSE is that of Alice Bishop.



Here is a great charicature of Grandpa. We call him "super-grandpa"! Ahna is in the background in her usual overalls!

Who can resist such a cute guy??
Here's super-grandma, again!

And now for a photo of Selena, Ahna and Kathryn. We felt like aliens but we laughed so hard!!

And now for some more photos from our Thanksgiving FUN house!!!

Kyle
Jeffrey
Kyle and Jeffrey
Selena and Kathryn
Kyle
Grandma and Grandpa
Selena and Kathryn
Kathryn
Jeffrey still has long eyelashes!
BYE!!!

"Houdini Ferret" by reporter Selena Jara

For the last few months the Jara household has been waking up to the scratching and scrambling of a ferret as she knocks over everything she can possibly find. However, at night Selena Jara, the oldest child who keeps the ferrets in her room, has made sure that the door of the cage in locked and closed, but the ferret continues to get out.

In order to find out just exactly how the ferret is getting out I have launched an investigation to find out how. We started by going into Selena’s messy room. There are four ferrets that live in the big cage that takes up one whole wall of Selena’s room. Kit, Sky, Blackey, and Foxy are seemingly innocent pets that merely live in the cage all day long. However, the smallest and perhaps youngest ferret, Foxy, is the one who is escaping all these nights. First we looked around the cage for possible escape routes.

One choice of escape is the front door that we took from the other, smaller cage that we took apart when building the new one. It serves as two doors in one and swings out from the cage. Sometimes the door will shift out from the center and then go far to one side where the ferret would merely have to climb up the cage and slip through the opening to get out. Another way is through the back of the cage where the bars are very large and measure 4 mms wide and 4 mms long. Foxie’s head is at least five mms wide and 2 mms tall and with a lot of adjusting of her body she was able to escape through the back once in our presence but that proved a bad idea when her back half got stuck, so we eliminated that idea.

The way that Foxy gets out is still a mystery even now. Although the front door is still a very real possibility there is still no guarantee that this is so since we have yet to see her try to get out this way. I will keep surveying Foxy to see which way she actually gets out and report again next month.

Animals of the Jaras by Xavier

Hi! I am Xavier if you are reading this you have probably read my sister's blog in which she says that we have a lot of animals. Let me introduce our 42 animals.

First there is Jota, our 150 pound Great Dane, but don't worry he's not a monster. The giant, lovable pooch is sweet, gentle and is afraid of just about everything. He loves you to chase him when he has a stick and you don't, he also loves to jump up and down if you are somewhere he can't get to (like if your on the other side of the fence) which is very intimidating because he is HUGE.

Second, there is Skippy Lu who is a small Pointer mix that was our foster dog last spring. When there was about to be a big adoption event we saw that Jota loved her so much that we had to adopt her. She is very sweet to humans but with other dogs she barks non stop. She plays with Jota rough and Jota loves the attention.

Then there is Zarco. He was our first dog. He is a pure breed Jerland German Shepherd. He is most bonded to my mom. If she leaves the house he will not eat and he will howl to my violin. He loves to be wherever my mom is and loves to be scratched on the back.

After that there is the 4 ferrets Foxy, Bandit, Sky, Bear. They live in Selena's room in a giant cage we made ourselves out of organizer squares. Every time I go in to the room the four of them all crowd my feet and constantly lick them and it tickles like crazy.

We also have two birds. One is a cockatial named Pepe and the other is a parakeet named Pepper. Pepper loves his bell that Selena gave to him a long time ago. Pepe is happy if you whistle the "Bridge over the River Kwai."

Then we have a cat named Emily. She has one eye, the other eye turned into a tumor looking thing and there is am interesting story behind that but we'll tell you about that later. She loves attention and is queen.

We have 25 chickens including 3 roosters. One is named Cow, he is black with a green tint, Pidge is Cow's son and he is kind of white. There is Junior who is also Cow's son and is completely black.

And we have seven ducks that are all very nice and loud.
3+4+2+1+25+7=42 I think?

Sincerely, Xavier Jara

Introduction by Selena

Good Morning Lizards and Slugs, this is Selena, daughter of this cyberspace family that you have stumbled upon. While I fully wake up I am typing this, waiting for my maternal section of the parental unit to get me coffee which is why this post seems slightly, well.... insane.

So now I will introduce you to my world. Later on you will meet the maternal section of my family unit in which I mentioned earlier, presumably in later posts, she is the one that mixs together food to put in our darling little stomachs, cleans house to get us from wasting away in our own flith, and spoils all the little critters that live with us, to which I will introduce you later. But be not fooled! Mother Dearest can not only trounce you in a game of puzzles but she can wrestle a 150 pound Great Dane into submission (Jota, our dog).

Next we meet, René, paternal unit of the Jara household. René works very hard as a professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Minnesota. René deals with other professors all the time and is famously patient (at least with us) and sweet.

Then there is Xavier, my younger brother in the Jara Family, who enjoys a number of musical intruments (banjo, guitar, and violin) and loves to play a number of video games (of which I like to play "Kirby", a fluffy pink, floating ball). He is also the one that keeps our mangy mongrels consistently amused and tired most of the time.

Me? No... there's no way I could make an accurate character assesment of myself, I'll leave that up to whoever wishes to write about me.

Till next time Lizzies and Sluggies,
Selena