Thanksgiving Events

Each year the kids' school hosts their annual Friendship Stew the day school lets out for Thanksgiving Break (I know, I know, we didn't have Thanksgiving Break when I was a kid either. Only Thanksgiving and the day after, and half day on Wednesday if we were lucky).

I always insist that if I am going to eat lunch with them, then they have to sit at the table where we are at. However, their friends then migrate to our table! See:

No biggie, we love these kiddos!

Our annual family photo at the Thanksgiving Stew.

Each year on Thanksgiving Day we take individual pictures for our Thanksgiving book. It's a great tradition we started years ago and the kids love to look back at it to see who we've joined at Thanksgiving and what they were thankful for.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with many families who brought food potluck style to our church multi-use room. There were far too many people to count, some I didn't even know as the numbers kept increasing right up until the moment of. We had a good time enjoying each other's company. Yohn and I spent a lot of time with our kids and of course the kids they were playing with!

Yohn and Bethany watching Turbo.

Elisha insisted on a photo shoot of him doing a lay-up in the gym. Ya know, where the lighting is bad and me and my inability to get a great photo in a dark room. Me thinks I'm gonna have to play with those settings on the camera and stop finding every excuse not to. If I want to take better gym pics that is. But with some editing this one didn't turn out too badly. (blah, blah, blah, I know!)

Lil' Cutie!

We had T and Harmony over to stay the night. The kids all planned on staying up all night long, but after watching how hyper they were and then how that all turned around when they started to get tired and gripe at each other I insisted they lay down with a movie. T lost his "bet" of being able to stay up the longest when he fell asleep withing 5 minutes of laying down.

Bethany none too happy that I used the flash! :)

She won by the way, she stayed up the latest. She has that kind of "endurance" and can pretty much outlast anyone anytime she pleases. But then she crashes pretty hard later on!

Elisha went down second!

And this is how I found Harmony, after she had fallen asleep third! Love this pose! It's one of those you could think up a hundred captions for. 

Hope your Thanksgiving we a great one! I can't wait to see pictures!

Basketball

The basketball season has just began around here and my son's team is two games in. This is the third time he's played basketball. It would have been the fourth, but we skipped last season. This year is different though, this year his best friend T is on his team too!

Not the greatest of pictures I know. Gyms aren't known for their great lighting. Neither I am known for my ability to adjust controls on my camera. Elisha is on the left looking for a pass.

A few photos after the game...

And what's a game without a captive audience?
I say that while I sit here and laugh because really, only Harmony wanted to watch the game. The other two sat and played DS or goofed off.

Ice cream afterwards!

Look! We were there too!

It was a sad start to the season as the boys lost by a landslide. At one point they came back having us believe they were really going to make a game out of it. Then the other team took off again (point-wise) and

the Saints never had another opportunity to catch up.

Welcome to Jr. High ball boys!

Kid's Camp

Here I go again, blogging about summer. I can't help it. I didn't post these great pics yet and I just have to get it outta my system. Okay, okay, that's probably gonna take quite a while...

My kiddos look forward to Kid's Camp with the church each year. And I mean, who could blame them!

There's lots of swimming...

...crazy games...

(that's panty hose on his head and he had to race to each the go-gurt out of the package the fastest)

...hanging out with friends...

...and Daddy too (literally!)...

...lesson time...

(look at that summer bleached hair!)

...worship...

...and the best part? No one is "too big" for kid's camp yet. *Sigh* That happens next year.

School Photos

The kid's school photos are back and I think this year we have double winners!

Elisha ~ 6th grade ~ 11 years old

Bethany ~ 5th grade ~ 10 years old

They look way too big though. They just are not listening when I tell them no more growing up! :0)

Pumpkins, Costumes & Everything in Between

The last week and half have been a bit of a whirlwind around here. But I am determined to post about it so your getting a bit of random post with lots of pictures. Buckle up your seat belts, and relax for the trip, it's a lengthy one!

This is possibly Bethany's last year to visit the pumpkin farm on the annual school field trip. She's gone to this one since she was in kindergarten and is now a fifth grader. It was kind of a bittersweet day.

A run through the corn maze!

She even stood still long enough for me to get this picture.

And got one final chance to go up front to play the instruments.

I'm in love with this picture! Elisha said I should use it for her 8th grade slide show. (The kids' school does a special slide show for its graduates.)

But I do like this picture too!

Worms!

Shifting gears....

Costume Sunday left us still waiting for a key piece of Elisha's costume to arrive from ebay so he went as a duck hunter instead. Can you guess what he was really going to be?

This is the best picture of my baby in her costume!

Did you guess yet? Here's a hint: There's this tv show that has duck hunters on it...

Sports team day at school.

Crazy Hair day pics...

Elisha's lizard didn't really turn out the way we wanted it to, but it still looked pretty good!

Good enough to pull off a win!

Yohn got into it too!

Some more favorite people!

Bethany's hair at the end of the day.

Now we're taking a detour...

Did you know I had triplets?

Two sets apparently!

And yes, they both won again, along with their friends.

Costume Day and cake contest entries...

Haystack cake with sheep, chicken and bull cupcakes.

Wolf cake

Did you figure his costume out yet? :)

My Superman fan!

Taking the exit now...

The original trick or treating crew...

Giraffe, Supergirl, Uncle Si (Duck Dynasty) and Zombie Surgeon

See how the crowd grew. We started out with four and ended up with seven kids and three adults.

Visiting everyone's favorite preschool teacher. And yes, all but two of them had her in preschool and the ones that didn't love her still because there's just so much to love about her. Last month marked her 40th year working at our school and she's still going strong and loving the little ones!

Free Krispie Kreme donuts!

We were definitely packed in... and this is before I joined in the back seat! We had so much fun even being squished and the kids, though very hyper, were pretty good. We wanted to do free IHOP pancakes too but just didn't have the time. Ah well, there's always free pancake day in February! (And no Bethany is not pouting even though it may look like it, she was trying, as she put it, "to show off her giraffe smile".

Did you make it to the end of our journey?