Happy, Happy, Happy Halloween...

from Si and Phil of Duck Dynasty...

(If you have never seen that show, watch it.  Now.)

And Happy Halloween from Jerry Rice, Minnie Mouse, Lady Ladybug, and Ronnie Lott!

Easter continued...

We had an awesome Easter this past Sunday, filled with everything Easter should be filled with: church, friends, Starburst jelly beans, family time, little girls in dresses and hairbows, boys in "shirts with a collar", picture taking, egg hunting, and Easter baskets.

And we managed to train Harper to shout "Jesus is alive!" when we ask her about Easter.

Please forgive my pictures. The flash on my camera only works about a third of the time, and the other two-thirds of the time I just take really bad pictures.

Aidan got a new hat that he insisted on wearing the entire day. On the band on the hat is a little gold pin in the shape of a rabbit.

He asked several people at church on Sunday if they "liked his new hat with stripes and a golden bunny on it". Love that kid.

Even when he makes faces like this for most of his pictures.

My Dane has another loose tooth. This one's been loose for about a month.

He's been training with Brandon (every now and then) to run a 5k next month.

He didn't believe me when I told him that if he sneezed his face would stick this way:

I can't get over how much older Emerson looks in this picture than she did last Easter.

Gone is whatever was left of the sweet toddler with the baby fat, replaced by this lean little girl.

(Sidenote: we've recently switched the kids back onto whole milk, in an effort to put a little meat on these kiddos' bones. They are all great eaters, but we still see a lot of little ribs and bony legs running around.)

One little Easter-celebrater did not want to take pictures with Mommy, so I basically had to chase her around the front yard with my camera for a few minutes.

In what is becoming an annual Easter tradition, the kids all got beach towels and swimsuits in their baskets.

Harper has not let this pink tu-tu swimsuit out of her sight since Sunday.

We rounded out our Sunday with an Easter egg hunt in the backyard.

Emerson had the honor of finding the very last egg, that no one else could find, inside this football glove.

She was just a little proud of herself, shouting "Boo-yah!" at her brothers when she found that last egg. That's my girl :)

Hope you and your family had a wonderful Easter weekend!

Hoppy...

...Easter!

Easter Sunday found us

JUMPING

for

JOY

in celebration!

More pictures to come...

and, yes, I know it's 3 days past Easter and I'm just now posting this. Technical difficulties with Mac and I and my Easter pics :(

Thanksgiving, part 3 of 700

It's now December, and I still have four drafts for blog posts about Thanksgiving. Yikes, I'm a bit behind. Hopefully I can get these cranked out in the next few days, so I can talk about how completely unprepared I am for Christmas season.

Thanksgiving is slowly but surely becoming my favorite holiday. The extended family, the shopping, the cool-but-not-too-cold weather, the kitchen full of people and various pies. I love it all. This year was no exception. We spent lots of time with my family, and the kids got lots of good cousin time in.

The boys spent some time on the back deck, poppin' wheelies on the big wheels

and shooting BB guns at the homemade target my dad had constructed.

Board games were played (note to self: Emerson is not the best 'Risk' player).

The men in my family cook just as much, if not more, than the women, and I spent my fair share of time sitting at the bar and watching the guys cook.

Unfortunately, I am not so skilled in the art of the "candid shot", and the boys insisted on cheesy poses.

I'm pretty sure most of the adults lived for the precious quiet of nap time every day for a couple of hours in the afternoon. One afternoon the kids were a bit too quiet, and we went upstairs to find that Emerson and Zane had found my mom's stash of Easter eggs.

Yes, my mom has 400 easter eggs in November. Just in case. There's a pretty good chance she hid them in the store behind a stack of crock pots until they were on clearance after Easter.

My dad took the boys out to the train track to leave pennies for the trains to run over, then went out the next day to retrieve their flattened coins.

I'm such an un-fun mom to have never done this with them before. And Dane's shoes had gotten wet in a kite-retrieval excursion, so he had taken them off. I promise I didn't send my children out barefoot and freezing to go play on the train tracks.

Baby Nora helped the guys in the garage (please don't ask me what they were building. I have no idea).

On Friday we enjoyed a much needed night off. My dad had several complimentary nights at a nearby hotel that would expire in a few months, so Brandon and I, and John and Brandy, and Andy and Lindy ditched the 7 grandchildren with my parents and headed out for a blissful night in a lovely hotel suite.

Look how empty it is! No Easter eggs on the floor or half filled sippy cups under the bed!

And it's quiet! No tattling, screaming, or crying to be heard.

And a balcony. With perfect weather. And nothing (except a steak dinner at the hotel restaurant) on the agenda.

Did someone say "steak dinner"? We met up with our fellow kidness-for-the-night kin for a delicious dinner in the completely empty fancy restaurant downstairs.

We had two waiters, it was so empty. And the dinner was comped along with the room! Free steak? Yes please!

Thanks, Momo and Pappy for a much needed night of peace and quiet, in the middle of a busy, fun Thanksgiving weekend!

Let's Go Fly a Kite

(I'm going to spend this next week going through the 2000 pictures taken over Thanksgiving and blogging about our fun holiday with family. I know this won't be interesting to some of you, so consider yourself forewarned.)

I almost don't know where to begin to blog about this past week, so I think I'll skip ahead to Saturday afternoon. My dad had made a couple of kites (with some gracious last minute sewing help from their "friends-since-before-I-was-born-friend", Colyn.) There are very few people who will sew kites for you two days before Thanksgiving, while trying to plan a Thanksgiving feast for 30 of your closest relatives, and I am very thankful that Colyn is one of those people.

And why didn't we sew the kites ourselves? Oh, we are, with few exception, not a crafty people. Except for Lindy. My sister Lindy is semi-crafty, and at one point this past week she convinced me that we were going to make felt flower hair clips for our girls together. Sounds simple enough. Trace flowers onto felt, cut flowers out, hot glue flowers strategically to hair clip for instant cuteness.

So cute, right? (And baby Nora's not bad, either!)

Turns out, I am only good at the "tracing the flowers" part of the craft. I cut little flowers out of felt for about 20 minutes and I wanted to stab myself in the eyeball with the scissors. And my flowers looked a little bit like stars. I am not cut out for any type of craft that requires cutting small shapes. There are many reasons why I am not an elementary school teacher, and the cutting stuff out part is just one of them. But, surprisingly, the felt flowers cut out by the remedial scissor-user turned out pretty cute!

Back to all the kite flying. Pappy made a couple of kites before we got to town, and we just had to polish them up a bit to make them fly-ready.

Yes, that is my husband wielding a blow-torch at the kitchen table over Thanksgiving, while small children looked on in wonderment. A few minutes later, the Yellow Jacket and Red Dragon ready for their debut, we headed out into the incoming cold front, complete with near-freezing temperatures, cold wind, and a little drizzle to fly the kites in Colyn's made-for-kites backyard.

It was the highlight of the week for Dane, and with the exception of some very memorable tacos in Aidan's book, his favorite activity as well. (Seriously. They flied kites, shot BB guns, played front yard football, put pennies on the train track, and played with their cousins all weekend, and Aidan's favorite part of the trip was "going to that taco place".) Harper actually busted out the "Let's Go Fly a Kite" song from Mary Poppins, and she thought she was just so cute and big.

The kites were a big hit. Red Dragon went up first, and an unfortunate crash landing ended his high-flying dreams for good on that windy Saturday. Yellow Jacket had a chance to shine, and the kids each got a turn to fly the kite.

Emerson was the only one who almost got a little "carried away".

Of course the men of my family fashioned a parachute and miniature video camera to float up the kite line. That's not a part of everyone's kite-flying experience?

After Yellow Jacket crashed across the street, Uncle John and I took the little kids home for some lunch and hot chocolate, while the big boys, Pappy, Brandon, and Uncle Andy logged some more kite time and got Aidan some tacos.

More to come from our fun Thanksgiving break later this week!