Sunday, November 26, 2006

Was your turkey good? Ours certainly was and it was so nice to not be on the road with all of the traffic. We had a great time having everyone at our house and Ella was able to sleep through most of the meal. We all loved having so much family around and we even took a group shot of everyone (with my sister-in-law's camera). I didn't get many pictures at all but was able to enjoy the company and the food. Mike picked on me for doing an "arts and crafts" game but I thought it was fun. We all wrote down something kind of silly that we were thankful for and something serious. We read them all aloud so that everyone could guess and see who wrote it. I will just say that I am thankful for disposable diapers, lovies, naptimes, and toilet paper. What about you? Any other fun family traditions out there?

Now we have gone straight from Thanksgiving into Christmas mode with a visit to the festival of lights. For the first time we got Landon out of his car seat and put him in the front passenger seat for a better view of the lights as we were only going 2 - 5 miles per hour and within the first couple of minutes he wanted back in his seat. I guess if you are always in there then it feels really weird to be out. It amazes me how many lights they have and the detail involved. On Friday we decided to make our own light arrangement in the yard. Our neighbors went in with us to get the "big bulb" colored lights and we were aiming to put them on the beautiful Christmas tree shaped pine in between our houses but after seeing that it was probably 60 feet high and the limbs weren't very stable we made a tree shape arrangement in the front yard. It is cute and the kids love it. From there we got the kids all dolled up on Saturday to try to get the "ultimate" Christmas card picture and spent a couple of hours keeping Ella out of the duck pond, making weird noises to get both of them to look and throwing rocks in a fountain just to try to get a picture. Didn't work! They looked adorable but we couldn't get one decent shot of both of them looking. Mike was so frustrated at the end that he vowed to never attempt that again (not even in a year). Call me crazy but I think I am going to try again tomorrow.

Tonight we had dinner club and it was great. The weather has been awesome but you can't ever complain about a good ole pot of pinto beans, some pork roast, and some cornbread. Everything was topped off with Amy's wonderful banana pudding. Yahoo - another 5 lbs to work off sometime.