Happy Thanksgiving

This year for Thanksgiving part of Jeff's family came down for about 4 days. We had a houseful, 7 adults and 5 kids! We had a lot of fun celebrating together and all the girls had a blast getting to play together.

This year, I really wanted to focus on being thankful, and teaching my girls all about our blessings. We began that morning with a prayer, just with our family of 5, and focused our hearts on being thankful for our blessings. As I thought about all that I had to be thankful for I realized my list could go on and on! But the thing I am the very most thankful for is my Savior, who's love in unending, never changing and that He paved a way for me to spend eternity with Him. And how could you not be forever grateful for that!

Here are a bunch of pictures of our Thanksgiving!

The girls all helping prepare dinner!




Our family of five on Avery's first Thanksgiving. Poor girl had a double ear infection, so I cooked most of Thanksgiving dinner with her on my hip. She wanted no part of being put down or anyone else (besides Daddy) holding her. She was pretty miserable.

There was a lot of dressing up that went on at our house!


That's about it for Thanksgiving day. The rest are pictures of the rest of the weekend.

We played at the park a bunch.






We all went out to eat dinner! Here are the big girls with Granny and Pawpaw.


And we hung around our house a bunch!








Disclaimer: I realize that Aubrey is wearing her wild and crazy pink headband in many of the pictures. That girl is in love with her headband and thinks she must wear it at all times!

Our 8th Anniversary

This anniversary managed to sneak by without even one picture. How sad is that! But I still had to squeeze it in the blog so I can look back one day and remember. We still had a great day of celebrating even though nothing was captured. The day began with us girls getting out of the house as quickly as we could so the house cleaners could come clean. Pretty good anniversary gift right! I absolutely love coming home to a completely clean home, especially if I wasn't the one that did it!

Jeff came home with this beautiful bouquet for me.


That night we had a sitter and Jeff and I went to the Movie Tavern, which is dinner and movie and we saw Breaking Dawn. That was the first we movie we had seen in over two years! We will definitely go back to the Movie Tavern since we can squeeze both dinner and a movie. After that we went and had dessert and wine at a restaurant here in Kingwood.

Although our anniversary wasn't as romantic and exciting as some in the past have been, I had such a wonderful time just spending some alone time with Jeff. He is my best friend and I feel so incredibly blessed to spend my life with him. He loves me so much more than I deserve. He is such a wonderful husband and Daddy and I so thankful that God chose him for me! We have some incredible memories over these last eight years and I can't wait to see what the next eight has in store. I love you Jeffrey Neal.

Getting Ready for Thanksgiving

We are in full preparation mode here at our home, getting ready and learning all about Thanksgiving. I love this time of year, and I really enjoy focusing on Thanksgiving and really truly stepping back and looking at all of our blessings. This year I didn't want to just stop at being thankful, I really wanted to serve and give some of our time to others so just maybe they have something to be thankful for as well! We have had lots of fun and even created some new traditions. Here is what we have been up to.

We started making this Thankful tree about three weeks ago and it has been so fun watching it grow. The things the girls have told us that they are thankful for are absolutely precious and have made Jeff and I pretty proud. I'm going to be sad to take this down. We are definitely going to be putting another one up next year. Even Jeff and I have put some hands up there which the girls have loved.


This is the bible verse we have been memorizing which went perfectly with our tree. The girls have done great with memorizing their verses.


Of course we have made lots of turkeys and read lots of Thanksgiving books.





God has been putting lots of new things on my heart lately. He is definitely up to something! Lately I have been convicted of living a very complacent life and He is at work changing me. I keep being reminded through scripture and friends, that God calls us to be His hands and feet. And that is what I want to do, and that is what I want my girls to learn as well. So I stepped WAY out of my comfort home and decided we would start visiting a nursing home in the area on a regular basis. I figured that was something easy enough, and close to home that we could definitely do. So the girls started making Thanksgiving cards, and we made some pumpkin chocolate chip cookies to take up there. We delivered everything this morning and it went really well. My girls (super shy, quiet girls mind you), handed their cards to the patients, said "Happy Thanksgiving" very very sweetly, and actually offered their name a few times. I was so proud of them for also stepping out of their comfort zone and serving others. They were so excited when we got in the car and Aubrey immediately asked when we were going back. One tiny step down!

Here they are making cards and helping me make cookies!






This next part was so very fun and definitely something we plan to do again! The girls weren't quite getting the whole pilgrim and Indian thing at all. So I decided that it would be really fun and help them understand a little better, if we made hats and had a "First Thanksgiving Dinner" (actually lunch for us). They loved loved this! We had turkey (really just lunch meat rolled up with cheese), green beans, tater tots, grapes, rolls, raspberry limeade from sonic, and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies for dessert. We talked all about the first Thanksgiving while we ate, and we also talked about all sorts of things that we are thankful for. I really loved doing this with them. I even made an Indian hat for myself to participate in the fun!



Enjoying dessert!






Aubrey actually took this picture. I was super impressed. And now you can see that Avery really was a part of it too!

Now we just have to get ready for the real thing. Family comes in next week and we are so excited and anxious for them to get here!

Family Pictures

We finally had new family pictures taken, and now Avery can be included on our walls around our house! My very talented friend, Michelle, took some great pictures of us and they turned out so cute. There were way too many choose from that we loved but here are some of our favorites!

Disney on Ice

This past Friday, Jeff had the day off, so we decided to have a very much needed family day. We surprised the girls with a trip to Disney on Ice. We told them the day before that we were going to have a family day, but we didn't tell them til Friday morning that we were going to Disney on Ice. As I have mentioned before they love Angelina Ballerina books right now, and we had just checked out Angelina Ice Skates a couple of weeks ago. So they have a small idea of what ice skating was, but they had no idea of what was to come! They were so excited and anxious to get there after we told them.

These girls were mesmerized with the whole show and loved every part of it. Their favorite parts were watching Ariel ice skate, and Tinker Bell. It was a really cute show. Avery was such a trooper once again and actually slept through the end! In April all the princesses are coming for another Disney on Ice. We may have to take them back for that one!






This is pretty much how they looked throughout the whole show.


When we got home that afternoon, Aubrey gave Avery a bottle for the first time. So very cute.