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!