Thanksgiving!!!!

After four years of hosting Thanksgiving at our house, my sister graciously offered to host, since they now have room to do so. We had a great time! It was the three of us, plus my sister and her husband and daughter, plus our other sister, plus my aunt and her friend. We ate good food and enjoyed each other's company. Good times! Of course, we have to post pictures of the event.

First off, the turkey. I used a turkey oven bag a couple years ago and have decided it's such an easy way to go, and the turkey ends up beautiful, brown, and juicy:

Me and Joshua, anxiously waiting for Uncle Rich to finish carving the turkey and Aunt Brianne to finish with...something (you can see them both in the background):
Our table! Everyone looks so thrilled to have their picture taken...

After dinner, Cody and Joshua played Wii Swordfighting (or whatever it's called). Basically, they throw an object in front of you and you're supposed to slash it a certain way. Cody used a Wii remote and Joshua used his cousin's stuffed giraffe:

Me and my love:

Our family!

The Lees:

The girls! L-R: Brianne, Maggie, Kirsti, Carina, and Jan:

Seesters!

It was a fun day. Thanks to Kirsti for hosting and thanks to everyone for spending time with us. I know it's a little late, but I just want to say, for the record, that I am thankful for my family, my God, and my new life. It's been amazing.

Snow Day!

I'm really behind on blogging. I've had a bunch of pictures that I've been saving and thinking, "I need to write a blog post about such-and-such event and post these pictures." Well, I'm finally buckling down to it, thanks to a little downtime at work (gotta love finals week! It's dead around here!).

So! We had our first (and pretty much only REAL) snowfall a few weeks ago, the Saturday before Thanksgiving. It wasn't much, but enough that Joshua wanted to go outside and play for a little while. Here he is all bundled up beforehand:

See, there really wasn't a ton of snow to speak of...and it was rather wet snow...but to a 3-year-old, it was magical.
Probably his favorite part was walking around making footprints.

He made a snowman! You may have to look really, really closely to see it. But it's there.

The snow was so wet and easily compactible (is that even a word) that it just kept sticking to my boots, to the point where I was suddenly 4-6 inches taller. Platform boots, anyone?

He played so hard that, by the time we got back inside, that kid was SWEATY. And I just love those rosy cheeks.

We haven't had much snow since then, and certainly nothing that has stuck longer than an hour or two, but it was still pretty fun. I'm sure we'll be sick of snow eventually.

I Know the Scriptures are True

Joshua participated in his first Primary Program today as part of the services for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He said his part very well ("We have four books of scripture") and sang quite enthusiastically. And he was very well-behaved, I'm hear...I couldn't really pay attention to him, as I was on the other side of the chapel, directing the Senior Primary kids. But it was a wonderful program--the kids bore their testimonies well, both through saying their parts and through beautiful songs. It was very sweet and I love how precious these kids are.

Here is Joshua, looking all dapper with his hair actually combed (you can guess how much gel we had to use to get it to actually go where we wanted it to...):

Joshua and Daddy:

Joshua and Mommy:

What a wonderful Sabbath day!

Punkins!

We carved our jack-o-lanterns today. I am somewhat proud of them this year, not because they are amazing designs or anything, but because we used pumpkins we actually grew in our garden (technically this was the only thing we grew in our garden, and we didn't even plan to do a garden...Joshua planted these seeds during a Primary lesson at church in February, and somehow the plant just flourished). That's why one of them is still partially green, by the way. We couldn't wait for it to turn orange :) Joshua requested a scary face and a silly face. Results are as follows:

He is SUCH a ham.

I love how this one ended up--Joshua just happened to look to the side as Cody snapped the picture:

Ward Halloween Party

Thanks to my sisters and their creativity, we all had costumes this year! We had already planned on Joshua being a fireman, but somehow we ended up with all in theme. Starting off, we have Joshua's lovely candy bucket:

It's so hard to get him to smile for pictures sometimes...

Can you tell what Cody was? Hint: the rectangles on his shirt are red and blue. And he's holding what he's supposed to be in his hand (and yes, that is a Transformer).

Daddy and son:

Wish I had a full-length picture of me so you can see my white shirt all covered in spots!

Mommy and son:

We had a great time at our ward's Halloween party last night. We had good chili and cornbread, played games, trick-or-treated to the doors in the building, and enjoyed the company of our ward members. Happy Halloween, everyone!

FHE at Cornbelly's

We went to Cornbelly's for FHE last Monday night along with my sister and her cute family. Despite it being pretty cold and us arriving a little too late to really take advantage of all the fun stuff there before the kids got tired, we had a good time. We started the night off with take-out dinner at the picnic tables while Joshua ran around and played (that kid rarely eats...how he is as big as he is, I will never know). Then we took a ride on the little tractor train thingy, did the kiddie corn maze, and took tons of pictures. Here are a few of them!

Joshua the truck driver

Joshua the ship captain:

The slide at the bouncy house (and some girl who wouldn't get out of the way...):

Our fun family:

This is the best smile he could come up with:

My sister, her husband, and their adorable daughter Maggie:

Before we went into the corn maze, we tried out the hay bale one:

Corn maze! Not sure what that look on my face is, but yeah...

They have these little spinny wheel thingies every so often in the kiddie corn maze, and you're supposed to spin them and do that action until you find the next spinny wheel thingy:

A sample of one of the wheels:

Mommy and Joshua:

Cody being Cody:

Joshua loved this little spider web:

Help! I'm caught!

Sliding out of the castle:

Swingin'--whoa, those are big feet:

Once again, Cody being Cody, and Joshua calling for me to come up in the castle with them:

Joshua the train conductor:

Random carousel horse:

That's a big pumpkin!

Cody doing a little jig on stage in the Princess Fairyland area:

Joshua wandering among the pumpkins:

Daddy and Joshua in the fire truck--perfect considering Joshua's costume this year:

Me on the big bouncy balloon thingy:

We had a great time...at least we know that, next year, go earlier so it's not so freezing! Hah!