Thanksgiving Weekend

We spent Thanksgiving at home this year and although it was a little weird to be alone, it was certainly nice not to deal with packing or crazy sleeping arrangements or (worst of all) Thanksgiving traffic!  All the more so since it was snowing on Wednesday afternoon when we would have been in said traffic.  And although we didn't get everything done we had hoped to this weekend (most notably, no Christmas decorations are up), we are on top of the laundry and grocery shopping and the Christmas cards are mostly done, so we are starting the week in a pretty good place.

We spent the first half of Thanksgiving out in the snow.  Joe did most of the shoveling (with a little help from me and Nicholas) and the kids and I built a snowman.  Okay, Nicholas and I built a snowman and we tried to keep Elizabeth from getting too upset long enough for us to finish.

As you can see, she was somewhat interested in the snow

From 2014 November

From 2014 November

but was done with the whole thing sooner than Nicholas was ready to go in.

From 2014 November

We then made a shockingly successful Thanksgiving dinner, the kids impressed us with their willingness to eat everything, and then went to a friend/colleague's house for dessert.

From 2014 November

I'm not really sure where the rest of the weekend went.  We ran some errands, we worked on Christmas cards, we did dishes and dishes and more dishes, we ate pie, we read A LOT.  A couple things from the weekend:

Elizabeth suddenly went from walking 5 or 6 steps between people to walking all over the house.  She was quite literally doing laps in the circle around the kitchen and hallway.  She also now stands herself up and walks somewhere rather than crawling there.  She still isn't walking everywhere and falls quite a bit, but she is now actually really walking.  We are going to need to get in the habit of keeping the bedroom and bathroom doors shut.

Nicholas spent almost 2 hours today working on a Christmas present for his teacher.  As I was telling Joe about this I was worrying that I hope she likes it because he worked really hard and is so excited to give it to her.  And then I had the realization that she is a kindergarten teacher and so 1) will appreciate that he worked so hard on it and 2) even if she dumps it in the trash when she gets home, she will never let on to him that she doesn't love it.

Me and my kiddos just hanging around the house this weekend:

From 2014 November

From 2014 November