Thanksgiving Weekend

We had a fabulous Thanksgiving this year, just staying around home and enjoying the long weekend together. I made all of the sides on Wednesday, so Thursday we just had to make the apple pie together and enjoy each other.

We played outside a lot and Emily did "Emily's roller coaster" for the little ones. :)

Family picture with the self-timer before dinner.

The day after Thanksgiving, we went for donuts and then ice skating. The kids did great and all four wanted to ice skate the entire 2 hours!!!

More Thanksgiving pictures can be found here.

Enjoy the video from our ice skating adventure!

Sing the States

Emily is in the jr. choir at church (for 1st and 2nd graders). She auditioned for this part in the spring musical, and got the part! Stay tuned for the big performance in April :)

Thoughts on Santa...

Since we've never "done" Santa in the past, I thought it was funny that the kids were all talking about Santa coming this year. Here was some of our conversation....

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Personally, I have so, so many things that I'm thankful for. I could go on all day....my husband, my children, Dave's job, our home, God's patience, love, and forgiveness that never end and I certainly don't deserve.....I could sit here all night listing our many blessings, for which I am truly grateful. But I just had to post Emily's little thankfulness writing from school, along with a picture of her with the table runner she also made at school. She is such a blessing to us!!
Poor Daniel is confused by Thanksgiving. Tonight before bed, I told him "Daniel, tomorrow's Thanksgiving!". He said "I get candy and eggs?" I reminded him that he was thinking of Easter, and that there's no candy and eggs on Thanksgiving. He replied "I need candy and eggs from that bunny!! I need you to take me to Easter!!!" The kid has had so much candy in his life that he really can't fathom a holiday without it!

Random pictures

Family Movie Night at church (the movie/theme was "Up")

The princesses playing dress-up at a friend's house

Daniel trying to be a "mean firefighter" :)

A very typical scene....Daniel and Lexi playing mommy and daddy with their baby....

Decorating for Christmas :)

Usually we wait till after Thanksgiving to decorate for Christmas, but we got into the Christmas spirit a little early this year :) We were traveling so much last year that we didn't even put up a tree, so this year we were all ready to start decorating early! Please excuse the clothing choices...it was a Saturday so the girls had full control over what they wore. Which meant Emily wore Lexi and Lainey's clothes, Lainey wore a unitard, and Lexi wore non-matching clothes :) But regardless of their non-Christmassy outfits, they had a blast decorating and getting into the Christmas spirit! Dave and Emily also put lights in Dave's precious magnolia tree outside :)

Do you think they enjoy each other???

The inseparable trio.....What will Daniel do without them next year?!

How to save money...

Have boys!!!! Seriously, I've been told for years how much more expensive girls are, but the divide is becoming more and more obvious each year. There's been lots of talk about "wishlists" lately, and I'm amazed at how much more expensive the girls are!
There's Emily.....the girl LOVES clothes. She walked into Old Navy recently and within moments had picked out $200 worth of clothes and shoes that she just fell in love with and had to have (we didn't buy any of them). She complains when I try to convince her to wear something that she wore last winter, that still fits, because "everyone's already seen me wear that". No joke. A six-year-old diva. I have no idea where she gets that, since I'm still wearing some things from high school. So her Christmas list involves hundreds of dollars' worth of clothes, not to mention about 100 books that she REALLY wants.
Then Lexi and Lainey....American Girl fanatics. They live and breathe American Girl. They play with their American Girl dolls nonstop. So for Christmas, they each really want a new AG doll ($100 each) along with hundreds of dollars' worth of AG accessories (yes, the AG outfits cost more than my own outfits).
And then there's Daniel. Precious boy. He doesn't have many toys of his own, since he spends the majority of his day being "Daddy" to the American Girl dolls. He mostly just plays house with Lexi and Lainey all day. No need for expensive toys for him. And since he doesn't care one bit what he wears, no costly clothes either. He's a simple boy, happy to just play with a rock or a stick. Wow, if I had a houseful of boys I guess I'd have a few more headaches, but definitely a cheaper Christmas wishlist! I will say, after asking him over and over what he wants for Christmas, the only thing he wants is a car. A $1 matchbox car. That's it. I've offered him many other things (trains, geotrax, trucks, etc) and he just keeps coming down to his "one car". I think I can handle that :)

In case you were wondering what was in all those bins....

I labeled them!!! The kids and I love the organization, but have been struggling to remember what goes in each bin. So today we labeled them! And we used pictures (as well as words) for the non-readers in the group. :) It kinda looks like a preschool, but considering the number of preschool-aged kids in the house, we basically have our own preschool anyway :) Now we'll be sure to put things away in the correct place!

The Great Playroom Makeover

A good friend doesn't mind telling you "This place is a mess". A really good friend will tell you "This place is a mess, let me help you organize it." Since organizing is not my strength, I'm glad to have a friend like Elaine who will come in my house, assess our needs, take me to the store to tell me what to buy, help me assemble it all, and then organize my junk. I know she's been wanting to get her hands on our playroom for years, so this week I bit the bullet and had Elaine over to "do the playroom". We spent Thursday morning looking over the toys, deciding what we need to maximize the space in the playroom. Then Friday, we met at Ikea to purchase the shelving, loaded it into Elaine's van (since mine is too packed with carseats), and came back to my house to begin work. Ikea opened at 10am and Elaine had to leave at 1:30 to pick up her daughter, so that gave us 3.5 hours start to finish. What a challenge!!! We spent 40 minutes in Ikea, then arrived back home around 11:20ish. We threw some chicken nuggets in the kids' direction and got to work. Wow, it's amazing what 2 moms with power tools can accomplish!!!! We got so quick that we actually put together some of the shelving units in 6 minutes or less! The kids were angels during all of this (I think they got all of the naughty out on Thursday when they dumped out all of the salt and flooded the bathroom). They played nicely while we worked like busy bees! By 12:45 we had all of the units together and in place and it was just a matter of organizing the toys. We got it almost completely done before 1:30, with just a few odds and ends left for me to finish (and tons of trash to haul away!).

The above is an older picture, but still a pretty common scene in our playroom "before".

Right before we started organizing.

Watch out world, these are 2 moms on a mission!

YAY!!! All done!!! The girls LOVE their little dollhouse center....and Dave loves that it's no longer downstairs :)

We'll probably eventually put another row on top of these, to make the shelving 3 stories high.

Thanks, Elaine! We all LOVE the "new" playroom! And also thanks to Dave for funding it and the kids for being so patient with their crazy drill-wielding moms :) Now nobody touch ANYTHING! ;)