Happy Thanksgiving!!

Happy Thanksgiving week! And what a week it was!  We had two full real Thanksgivings, and then leftovers since!  Wednesday night we had the Cammacks over for a "Friends-giving."  My brother invited us over for Thanksgiving, but we had to have leftovers, so we had our own the day before!  Also, Monica's diet can be pretty restrictive, so this way we knew we had some of everything.  We love Thanksgiving food, and we love the leftovers, so it was perfect!  To help drive this point, on Friday Monica went to Costco to get some groceries and happened to see clearance turkeys and picked up another 18 pounder.  Oh yeah, it's turkey time.

On Monday I took the kids outside to play.  Grayson and I sat in the grass, and he... well he just sat there.  He didn't really do anything.  But we did get to watch the sidewalk chalking.  The girls drew a few pictures, and then Brooke thought to do a hopscotch board, and then it was all hopscotch after that.  Brooke made an early exit after Winry kicked her for standing on her hopscotch board, and then Winry would draw individual squares, and then I believe decorate them with ears and... a mane maybe.  Then she did hopscotch jumping from one box to the next.  I was pretty impressed with her hopping, as I've never seen her jump like that before.  We were out all the way until we got called in for dinner.

On Wednesday I made my best attempt to dress Grayson and myself to be matching.  At least we're both in plaid, right?

Much of Wednesday was Monica in the kitchen, and me keeping everyone else out.  The girls went to play with Eleanor and Clara in the morning, so that was really nice.  Eventually night came, and with it company and food!  We set up a separate table for the kids, which usually ends up being a pretty big hit.  The kids all loved sitting together, while the adults got a little peace.

It was great having friends over, and we had a lot of fun!  I'm grateful that we have wonderful friends, and especially for the Cammacks!  Our families pair together so great!

After all was said and done and everyone under 7 was in bed (at least in our house), Monica and I were doing some cleaning up, when she turned to me with the wish bone!  It was time!.. or so we thought.  It wasn't dry yet, and didn't break, so we set it aside and will have to try again later.

On Thursday, also known as Thanksgiving proper, we headed up to Westminster to visit my brother's family.  We had a great time with them.  I think the big highlight is always that our kids have so much fun and don't always need us to entertain them.  Monica and I have a lot of fun catching up with everyone too.  While we were there Grayson was having a bit of a hard time, but fear not, we had our stroller in the van.  I think we always have a stroller in the van, and right now I don't think I ever want to leave home without one... I guess under the assumption I also have Grayson... probably don't need to take one to work.  Anyway, Grayson and I enjoyed a nice walk around the neighborhood and got back in time for Thanksgiving dinner!

One fun thing at Tyson and Tina's house was a big tree they made for their wall with lots of leaves.  The kids were writing things they were grateful for on the leaves and taping it to the tree.  Brooke and Winry both made a leaf to put up while we were there.  Also, Winry loves that she can "touch the sky" at their house.

Andrew surprised his family by coming out for Thanksgiving.  Originally he wasn't going to, and just headed up to my parents house.  My dad watched the weather, and since it was good, they came out to surprise everyone!  My mom did not come out though, as she's still not feeling great from her hip surgery and didn't think she could sit in the car that long.  I called my mom and we chatted for about an hour.  She was doing well, and was making a consolidated Thanksgiving of her favorite foods: turkey, mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes.  That's a pretty good list if you're pruning down.  We had a lot of fun talking and it was good to catch up.  After the call I stumbled upon some party games.  Here are all of the kids sitting on the "same" chair!  I texted it to Tina for their Christmas card, so I guess we'll see!

While there, Katelyn told me they had a salamander!  I used to have a bunch of salamanders growing up.  They would fall into our window wells and eventually I set up a tank and would keep one or two of them in my room and rotate through them.  They had a small salamander, and I was going to pick it up for a picture, but it was laying under a stick and I didn't want to bug it too much.

Grayson has started to do a little self feeding lately.  He's not great at letting go of food in his mouth, but he'll put something in his mouth and try to get it out of his hands. He's also started to hold his bottle when we feed him.  It's pretty nice, however this also means that once you make his bottle and are carrying him up to his room he'll rip his bottle out of your hands and start drinking it on the way up to nap/bed time. If you know Grayson, this is all a really big deal!

On Friday we decided to go to the zoo!  We had a lot of fun there, and we even went to the elephant and sea lion shows.  Here we all are waiting for the elephant show to start.

And the elephants did not disappoint!  Half way through, one of them almost left, but I guess he decided apples were worth it and turned around and came back.

Winry was so excited for the sea lion show because they jump up and touch a ball.  Sea lions are one of Winry's favorite animals (along with vultures) and I'm pretty sure it's from seeing it touch the ball.  That jump made a big impression on her long ago.

The lions were right up next to the glass when we got there, and the male was making some grunting noises or something too.  We heard him calling as we were coming over, and then he was silent while we were there so I didn't take a video, but once we left I heard him calling again.

On the way home Grayson stuck his foot in his mouth!  He's never done that before.  I guess if you want your baby to put some things in their mouth you've gotta be ready for EVERYTHING to go in their mouth.

On Saturday morning we went to get our Christmas tree!  The girls were so excited.  We got it in the base and decorated it right away!  This is reminding me I need to water the tree again, be right back...  All right, I'm back.  Glad I remembered that!  The tree looks great.  I wanted to take a picture of it once it's dark, but I forgot last night, so I'll try to remember tonight and get it in here for next week.  We also started decorating the house, but don't have all those lights up yet either, so I'll put a picture of the house up once it's all done.

Monica used the branches I cut from the bottom of the tree to make a wreath, and it looks great!  I love our homemade wreaths!

That afternoon, Grayson was having a hard time at home and needed something to do so I took him on a walk.  We were out for an hour! which took us all the way to nap time.  He was happy the whole time, except one part where the sun was in his eyes.

This morning Grayson really wanted to get to the Christmas tree.  We've made a barricade around it so he can't pull things off the tree.  Well, I put his play table too close and he used it like a stair case!  I got him before he fell in on the other side, which is good!  Looks like he's gonna be a climber...  Hopefully this was really just a fluke.

At church it seemed like Grayson was going to stay awake for church for the first time ever.  He made it all the way through sacrament meeting and never even seemed tired.  That quickly changed in elders quorum.  I even held him sitting up to try to help him stay awake (he's kind of transitioning to one nap, depends on the day, but it seemed like today would be one of those days) and he just curled up against me sitting up, put his thumb in his mouth and went to sleep.  So I spent the rest of church pacing with him.  He woke up before church was over, but was pretty grumpy for a little which forced us into the hall.  When we got home, Brooke wanted to change into some new clothes that she got as a reward for stopping sucking her thumb and let Grayson feel them because he loves soft things.  He was laughing and giggling he loved it so much.  He even started chasing her around to rub his face on her shirt!

I think those are all the happenings around here.  Jelly is currently in the Christmas tree playing with something.  I just keep hearing rattling, but things seem like they're probably fine.  The tree hasn't fallen over yet.  Anyway, I think that's everything for now!  Have a great week!

Brooke Turns 6!

Last week we had a sneak peek birthday party, but this week was the real deal!  Brooke is officially 6 years old!  What a champion!  We had a great birthday, and Brooke got to do lots of fun stuff!  We'll go over the details later, but here we all are at the end of the day watching Daniel Tiger!

This week the kids' matching Christmas pajamas came!  They were all so excited and put them on right away.  Brooke wore hers all day!.. you know.. minus school.  Monica took several pictures, and I liked this one the most.  It's still not a great picture of all of them.

Brooke turned 6 on Wednesday!  We had cereal for breakfast (her request), and then Brooke opened her presents!  She was so excited, and in typical Brooke fashion loved them all!  I gave her a Lego set she's really been wanting and she was through the roof.  

She also got this cheetah chair.  She sleeps with it in her bed every night.  I guess the proximity is comforting.  Anyway, Grayson loves the chair, you know, when it's on the floor and not in Brooke's bed.

Winry loves the chair too.  I guess it's just been a hot commodity all around.  Winry pulled up her blanket and filled the side pockets with books and relaxed!  In fact, Winry even read her new book from the book fair while sitting there.  

What book fair you ask?  Well, this week was also Brooke's school book fair.  I took the kids on Wednesday morning to pick out some books.  Winry picked out a Frozen book, and Brooke picked out a Lego princess book and an activity book.  After the book fair we dropped Winry off at preschool and headed home.  When we got home Monica offered up Brooke's next surprise, to go get a pedicure!  Brooke said no because she wanted to play with her Legos, which was a HUGE surprise!  She's been wanting a pedicure forever!  

Anyway, Brooke just played with her presents at home until it was time for school.  Because they were home, Brooke also got to see that is SNOWED!  First snow of the year!  It wasn't too much, but it was still exciting.

Brooke picked to get tikka masala for dinner which was an amazing choice!  Everyone loves it, even Grayson!  After dinner we had brownies and ice cream and sang Happy Birthday to Brooke!

And here's Brooke when she brushed her teeth.  I let her do 3 stickers because it was her birthday.

The girls got to stay up to watch a show for Brooke's birthday as well.  And of course Brooke needed to sit in her cheetah chair, which needed to be on the couch because that's where you watch movies.  Brooke loved everything from her birthday, so it was a huge success!

Grayson has finally started on the path of feeding himself!  This video wasn't exactly his best showing, but he fed himself some today!  He also loves drinking from his straw cups.  I've got a video of that for later.  It's so nice that he's finally starting to feed himself.  He's started sticking other things in his mouth too.  His favorite right now is Jelly's furry mouse toy... Not sure I love how often I see it in his mouth, or how wet I find it on the floor, but it's progress... so that's good, right?

On Saturday morning we took some food to the church to donate for our ward's Thanksgiving baskets.  When we got back I put Grayson down for a nap, and went to check on Winry.  I ended up playing with her in her room for the rest of the morning.  We played with Blume dolls, magnet dress up dolls, and Barbies.  It was a full morning.

Meanwhile Brooke was downstairs helping Monica get a head start on Thanksgiving cooking.  Brooke peeled ALL of the carrots for Monica.  I don't know what else she helped with, but I do know she was an excellent carrot peeler.

Later that day the girls made a fort.  Monica and I hung up those blankets by tucking them in the edge of the mattress.  Brooke came down during quite time and said they had something they were doing that needed tape.  Turns out she wanted to improve the fort by taping the blanket over to the sides of the bed.

They even made the stellar improvement of taping the fleece blanket to the carpet... Honestly, it held, and that surprises me.  They really enjoyed making their improvements.  The only down side is that when they finished they were taped out...  So they pulled up the corner and snuck inside.  That night when they got into bed, Winry asked me to re-tape the blanket around her bed.  Worry not, she was able to break out in the morning.

As promised, here is Grayson with his water cup.  Today I gave him a cup of milk and he picked it up and walked around the house drinking it.  He's had a LOT more VERY full diapers the last week or two.

Lunch today was an especially messy event.  His clothes didn't fair very well and we had to change him right after.  Maybe we shouldn't have had lunch in his church clothes...

Also, here's a little video of him climbing on his play table thing earlier in the week.  He has also started climbing on the couch too, though he only seems to do that when Monica is sitting on the couch and then he climbs up next to her.  Guess we'll see if he turns out to be a climber, but it looks possible.

Today we decorated some turkey cookies, and everyone did at least one.  The girls both did two.  We encouraged everyone to do their own as best they could.  Grayson definitely made an attempt, but by and large in the end he produced a cookies with stab wounds.  There was a little frosting on it, so maybe he's starting to get the idea.

Here are all of our turkey cookies together.  When I was baking the cookies last night I made two batches and then just threw the rest of the dough in the oven.  I decorated the big cookie, with Brooke's on the left, Monica's on the top right, and Winry's the two below Monica's.  Grayson's is on the bottom.

Look at that, I finally am writing a blog post on time!  Monica just headed up to get ready for bed, so I better call it quits or else it might be days before I remember to have her read this.  Have a superb week, and a wonderful Thanksgiving!

P.S. I'm a direct descendant of Myles Standish, who was on the Mayflower and was the military leader for the pilgrims in their colony.  I read a bunch about him, the Mayflower voyage and the first Thanksgiving today and presented it during my family call for our family history moment.  It was pretty cool to learn more about him, and to find out that I'm directly descended from a bunch of the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower!  No wonder I love large ships and turkey so much!  Oh, and Brooke learned about Myles Standish in school this past week and got to tell her teacher that he was her 12th great-grandpa!

 

Brooke's Birthday Party

Last Saturday Brooke had a birthday party with all her friends!  It was a lot of fun having everyone over, and all the girls had a great time!  During the party it was interesting to see how much more grown up Brooke is than Winry.  It's just not something you notice when they're playing together, but was more apparent with a group of older kids.  Anyway, I've got a bunch of pictures from the party, so I'll go through all the fun and games when we get there, but it was great times all around!

This past week the girls were doing Cosmic kids yoga.  I just have the video, no pictures, but I think it's really fun to watch them copy the poses.  I'm pretty impressed with how well they can follow some of them too.  I think dance and yoga has helped them have pretty good balance.

We've already gotten through our Christmas shopping, or at least most of it.  So we have a pile of presents in the corner all wrapped and ready to go.  Winry wrapped her present to Brooke, and wrote a tag for it all by herself!  She wanted it to say Brookie (rhymes with cookie), so she spelled it Brookee.

Grayson LOVES the vacuum cleaner and will follow it around and reach for it while Monica vacuums the floor.  He's the first of our kids to not have an aversion to loud sounds, which can definitely be nice.

Saturday was Brooke's party!  As people arrived we had crafts set up at the table for them to color.  The party was cheetah themed, so we had a cheetah puppet they could make, and another cheetah... color, cutout, glue thing too.  Some of the kids also made those into bag puppets.

We played pin the tail on the cheetah, and everyone had a LOT of fun.  A couple highlights were Brooke going first and getting her tail right on the money, Emma getting turned around and putting her tail on the door (seen below), and Fynnlee getting turned the opposite direction and trying to find her way from the baby gate!

We also played a freeze dance song.  This was a big hit and we listened to it a few times.  After this a few of the kids had to leave early for a basketball game, so we grabbed a picture of everyone together as seen at the top before they took off, and sent them away with cupcakes.

We opened presents, and Brooke was very excited about everything she got.

We played musical chairs, and kept going until everyone won at least once.  When someone won they got to pick a candy as a prize, so the competition was pretty heated.

And then we sang happy birthday and had cake!

And here's everyone enjoying a well earned treat!  After the cupcakes, there was still a little time before parents started arriving so we headed into the backyard.  We were going to do the whole party back there, but it started to get pretty windy, and we didn't want Brooke's party to get messed up by wind 2 years in a row.  Anyway, we still have our leaf pile because we were saving it for the party.  Good thing too, one of the kids had the brilliant idea to move the slide to the leaf pile (we saw them trying to move it from inside, and went out to help).  They had so much fun playing in the leaves in the backyard.

After the party I went out for a run.  I really like the flexibility this time of year to be able to run basically at any part of the day.  The run went well, and I saw some deer off the side of the trail.  There were two of them, and I'm glad they just kept their distance.

Every week when we drive to church, we drive past this park that's a pretty far walk from our house, so we typically never go there.  Every time the girls see it they always ask if we can go, so when we got home from church I took them all to the park.  Oh yeah, I was solo at church because Monica wasn't feeling good, and I had to walk around with Grayson basically the whole time.  The girls were amazing through sacrament meeting on their own, and I got 6000+ steps at church.  Anyway, back to the park.  We've actually come up here once before a few years ago, and this playground is aimed at older kids and the girls just couldn't really do anything.  Well, that's all changed, and we had a great time!  There were two different climbing walls, this one Brooke is on, and one on the other side that has those rock climbing hand holds bolted into it that was easier where everyone started climbing.

Winry kept trying to figure out how to get up this.  She'd climb up onto one step, but as she'd straighten up there would be a step right above her head.  She never quite got it, but loved climbing the first 2-3 steps.  You can also see that orange slide in the back.  Everyone loved that slide!  Also, that's the best park slide I've been on in recent memory for adults.  We all had a great time climbing and sliding and running around!  We even went to the field for the last few minutes to try some cartwheels, headstands, and somersaults.  We ended up staying there all afternoon and got back home just in time for family calls.  I think we might have to go back this Sunday (p.s. this park excursion happens during typical blog writing time, so I'll possibly be late again next week)!

And that's everything for this week.  Things have been going superb so far this week, but that's a tale for... *fingers crossed* Sunday!  Have an amazing week!

Grayson's First Steps!

Well hello!  It's not quite Sunday, but a lot closer than the last few posts have been!  I've got to make sure I have Monica proofread this today as well, or else it doesn't really matter how early I write it.  Big news here is that Grayson is walking!!  He's taken a few steps before.  If I remember correctly, Monica even saw him walk before we went to Utah for his birthday, but we've never been able to get it on video before, and those also ended up being one-off events.  Since Sunday he's been walking much more!  I'll sit on the floor and he'll walk over and fall on me and I'll tickle him, and then he'll crawl a few feet away, stand up and walk back over to do it again!

Brooke lost another tooth.  It was super wiggly for several days before it finally came out, and we were worried she'd swallow it in the night.  Everyone tried to pull it a few times, Winry included.  In the end it came out while she was eating something.  Now is an appropriate time for "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth."

I played that game where you wiggle your finger while making a sound with Grayson.  I'm not sure what to call it, but he'll get really excited when he's doing it.

I found Grayson standing on his plant block while playing with things on the table.  I don't know that he needed the extra height, but it was his favorite place to stand.  You can see he's on the computer too, so maybe this will become the new craze at work.  I guess standing desks will have to get a little taller.

We spent some time out in the leaf pile this past week.  Grayson isn't a super leaf lover, but I still put him in.  He just kinds of sits there.  He doesn't grab or throw the leaves or anything, just looks at me and waits to be moved.

Brooke was having a great time though, and was walking backwards and falling into the leaves without looking!  She did miss the pile once or twice, but was okay.  We had a good time, but unfortunately Monica vacuumed inside while we were playing, and 5 minutes after we came in you couldn't tell from the leaf remnants scattered around... Sorry Monica!!

Bit of a short post this week, but we had a good time.  I hope everyone had a great week!