.thankful.

Since we are already nearing the end of December (Christmas is in a mere week), I realized I needed to update again from our happenings of last month.  We stay pretty busy with three littles, even though it seems we spend the majority of our time at home.  As you can imagine there is usually a wake of chaos wherever we go...including church.  Roy and I have become increasingly more frustrated with our children's behavior during sacrament meeting, and sat down one night in an attempt to come up with a plan to help them out.  We finally decided we needed to practice reverence everyday at home, so they knew what was expected when we came to church.  We started out with five minutes and have worked our way up to 15.  It's still hit or miss most days, but then we have rays of hope too.  As you can see in this picture, E is clearly not having any of it.

Since my parents are in Nauvoo serving a mission, all the siblings pitch in once a month to do a big yard clean up and maintenance day.  November brought with it fall clean up in the largest way.  We raked and picked up wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full.  To keep the young ones engaged we had the boys jumping on the piles of leaves as they were dumped in order to fit as many loads as we could.  These boys throughly enjoyed their task!

The week before Thanksgiving Miss M came down with her first stomach bug.  As you can imagine it was quite traumatic for a two year old.  But within a day she was on the mend and back to her usual cute (and dramatic) self!

Finn's preschool did a big thanksgiving feast and I was able to go and help.  It was a great time watching these kids play and learn.  Finn is energetic and fun loving, and he makes my heart happy!

Thanksgiving day we spent the morning being lazy.  The girls colored away, we watched the parade, and I cooked.  We spent the rest of the day with our small family group, there were only 14 of us.  This was a big change from years past when 40 is our usual number.  Even though we were few in numbers, it was still special to be there together!

 As we were getting ready to leave on Thanksgiving night, my phone was knocked off the table and crashed to it's death.  I was really depressed about the whole thing.  I'm not someone who particularly needs the latest tech.  All I need is a phone that works really, but my old phone was so old that it was barely functioning with the latest OS update.  So we decided to forgo fixing it and just buy a new one.  Ughhhh, not how I wanted to end the month, but that is just how life goes.

Since the holiday break the kids have gotten into a very bad habit of getting up early...like 4 o'clock early.  Even for Roy who is a morning person this is unacceptable.  Here is Meg on one such morning telling daddy all the news.  

 Needless to say we are making changes and enforcing some new rules about what is an acceptable wake up time.  Because we all need more of this!