Thanksgiving 2012

It was another memorable Thanksgiving for the books! We thoroughly enjoyed our time in Tyler this year!  We'll start with one of my favorite pictures I took.  Might even have to get it framed for myself.  This is a picture of the steps leading up my childhood home. This is the house I was brought home from the hospital to and it has a LOT of memories attached to it.  I love that I captured fall and the worness of the number and steps.  It's iconic of what represents my memories.

 

 I have officially turned into someone that until recently I made fun of.  I ran my first timed 5K on Thanksgiving morning.  My hubbie, sister and sister in law joined me.  It was wonderful and I'm hooked!  I don't love running, but I love the effects of it, so I will continue to run 5K's as motivation to keep on running!  Here's me and Shawn before the race.

Here's Laura and Shawnette finishing!  So proud of Shawnette who worked HARD to do a couch to 5K on a treadmill in the garage while trying to balance being a new mommy too!  Keep it up girl!  And thanks also to my sister who kept Shawnette company on the 3.2 miles of course!

 

 Here's me sprinting in my fastest white girl sprint to the finish!  And just to be specific...my time was actually 33min 45ish seconds...there was about 15-20 seconds of walking at the start because it was so crowded that I couldn't run until it started to spread out a little!

 

After showering, we headed to my Memaw's for our yearly gathering.  It was a wonderful and relaxed day.  The kids did wonderful and the food was great!  Here's all the cousins on my side....it's amazing that the picture was even this good....goodness gracious, it's hard to get a picture of a lot of kids!

Doing the usual....sitting under the carport talking away.  I think it's funny that both my mom and I were talking and using our hands at the same time.

 

 I love this boy.

 

The matriarch and her son and grand-son-in-law.

Poppy and Levi picking up pecans and eating them.

 

I taught Elle to play Mary Had a Little Lamb.  This is the first time I've seen her get super frustrated about something and instead of giving up, keep trying until she got it.  I was so unbelievably proud of her for sticking with it!

 

We headed back over to Barbara's later in the afternoon and spent lots of good time with Emily's family and kids.  My girls absolutely LOVE these girls and I'm so thankful to Emily and Joey for providing so many wonderful lifelong friends for my kids.

A random tree in Tyler that I just had to stop and get a picture of.  I think Tyler's trees were unusually colorful this year.  I've never seen it like this before.  It was amazing everywhere we looked. 

Christmas Additions

I've added a few new elements to my decorations for Christmas this year and I absolutely love them. I used to be more about quantity when decorating for the holidays, but in recent years with budgeting more carefully, quality seems to be the theme. So, I've become more selective about what I buy to decorate with..and it's made all the difference. In every room I go into that's decorated, I love everything I see! Here are a few of the newest additions:

First, let's start with a surprise for the girls.  Last year they shared a green colored frog tree.  Ava begged for a peacock tree so for her birthday we bought her some ornaments.... of course we needed to get a tree for them to go on.  When they got home from school, we took them up to their room and there were their two new trees, lit up and decorated in their very own theme!  They were VERY excited and love their trees.

 

Ava's peacock tree

 

Elle's frog tree

I had all of this stuff randomly in boxes from past Christmases, but it all just magically came together this year on this wreath and I LOVE IT!  Yeah for recycling!

And here's a picture of all of us decorating the main tree in the living room.  I am very proud to say that I let the girls put the ornaments wherever their little hearts desired and I actually didn't care!  I did go back and fix a few spots where they had put 2 or more ornaments on one limb....and put a few of the more delicate ones higher up!  The tree looks magnificent as usual.  :)  Welcome to my favorite time of the year!

Scholars

 We're staying busy with lots of little projects and homework and daily readying and reteaching now that two young ones are in school. Ava has almost no homework, but Elle makes up for that. She doesn't have that much homework but she works very S L O W L Y. Some days we zip right through it and some days we're in knee deep mud for hours! But I do get excited (most of the time) when a project comes home and I can work with my girls teaching them artist skills and creativity and ingenuity! Yesterday I was able to go to their awards ceremony and it was super cute to see how excited they were that they were getting awarded for doing good work.

 Here's Ava's project where she was suppose to disguise her turkey....we call him Turkey Claws. She decided on the Santa thing all by herself.  And as I write this, Elle just walked in the door with her own turkey that needs a disguise....hmmm...what to do now. 

 

Yeah for healthy kids!

 

 Elle received perfect attendance and the A-B Honor Roll...which she worked very hard to be on!  P.S. Her teacher is the cutest teacher ever!

Ava is Reading!!!

Not only is Ava reading, but she is wanting to read to Levi which I find incredibly sweet.  Way to go Ava!