Thanksgiving Weekend

This has probably been one of the best Thanksgiving weekends that I can remember. Of course, we always miss being with family and that can't be helped. But, we were with some FANTASTIC friends. One family, the Bahes, invited us down to a beach house on Cape Cod. They are so nice and have a really great mix of personalities and you can just be yourself with them. They also invited another family, the Muirs, to come. The Muirs are also from Utah and they are really fun to be with too.Everyone pitched in to bring and make dinner. We had a mix of all of our family favorites. David made his mom's stuffing. Cooking and eating took all day on Thursday, (curse the lazy football watchers...)
but for the rest of the 3 days, we just hung out, watched movies, played wii, went for walks on the beach, and went shopping on Main St. in Hyannis in all of the little cute local shops. Oh, and we ate and ate and ate until I didn't even eat dinner tonight because I am still so full. Minus Hattie's EXTREME tantrums, the trip was a huge success. I am SO grateful that the kids were well this time. After battling through last Thanksgiving with 2 really sick kids, it was a treat to get to enjoy this one.Oh, yeah, and Bret is a vegetarian, so we had to be careful with all the recipes. Tofurkey? Really?
We topped off the weekend by getting our Christmas tree this afternoon and then Grace and I went to the Nutcracker. Our long-standing tradition of going to the Nutcracker has returned after taking last year off. It was so nice to spend time with just Grace. I never get to do that. I get lots of one on one with Hattie, but lately, Grace and I haven't had much mommy/daughter time. We had a ball. We dressed up to the 9's (ok, she didn't like that part) and went. She squealed at the mice, was dazzled by the dancing, and laughed at the big huge woman with all the little kids underneath. Next year, maybe we'll take Hattie too.We are definitely thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today, we are Thankful that we get to go on a really fun trip for Thanksgiving. We are again "lucky ducks" and have been invited by friends to go to Cape Cod and stay in a beach house for the holiday weekend. We wish all of our family and friends a very Happy Thanksgiving!!!

girls turn again

Grace came home today with a beautiful hand-made Thanksgiving place mat from school. It has her handprint, a nice poem, and a line at the bottom that says "I am thankful for_____and she wrote "MY DOGS."

Hattie is thankful for video chatting. She had a nice chat last night with Aunt Jess.

gratitude

I'm wearing thin on gratitude. I am thankful for all the big things and even lots of little things, but so many other little things are getting in my way. After 2 really great talks in church today on changing your attitude and taking on gratitude, I should be having a better attitude, but I am having an even harder time with it. Sundays wear me out in every way. I don't know why, but I can't get a grip on the day, I can't be organized, I can't be calm, and I can't get anything done fast enough to accomplish what has to be done. It is a frustrating day every single week. I guess I need an attitude adjustment. That said, I am thankful for 1 hour to myself while Hattie sleeps and Grace is out home teaching with David.

GO UTES!!!

Tonight we are grateful that:
The Russells have direct TV.
The Russells are super nice and invited us over.
The Utes WON!
Grace got to play with Logan.
Hattie was a good girl for the whole game.

sometimes it's a struggle...

...to be grateful at the end of the day for anything but that your kids are finally asleep. It was the only way to stop the fighting, tempers, and constant bidding for attention. I am grateful that Velvet is alive and hasn't died from the almost 2 pounds of peanut butter she ate tonight. I am grateful it wasn't chocolate. I am grateful that I am not a boy scout or a scout leader out camping in 15 degree weather tonight like David is.

shoes

I am thankful for shoes tonight. That is, thankful that I actually found a pair that Grace likes, says she will wear, and seem to fit her at a price that didn't start my debit card on fire (half of at the counter too!) She has these skinny narrow, long feet and trying to find dress shoes is almost impossible given that she hates dressing up to begin with anyway. Half the shoes are automatically out because she doesn't like them. I realized this week that neither of my girls has a pair of shoes that will match their Christmas dresses and that they will need to wear their dresses to do pictures and go to the Nutcracker well before Christmas! Seems like a trivial thing, but again, truly grateful to find some for Grace and for Hattie too. Totally annoyed I had to even shop for Hattie - we have 4 pairs of black patent leather dress shoes for this size/season from various hand me downs and not a single pair fit her!

Oh, we're also very grateful for the Santa sighting at the mall tonight. Hattie was beside herself with delight that she saw him and waved to him. Grace isn't convinced that the true Santa works so many hours at the mall, but is sure that this helper will pass along important info to the real man at the pole.

school pictures

Today I am so thankful that I changed my plane tickets in October so that Grace could be in her kindergarten school picture. It's priceless. She got the pictures back today. They're adorable. Her class looks shockingly small. It's true, no one was absent. There are only 15 kids in her class with a teacher and a full time aide and parent help every single day. If you're a teacher from Utah, you know what a luxury that would be. I'm just hoping that they take full advantage of that ratio. We'll see as the year goes by I guess.

grateful for staying warm

Today, I am grateful for the heated seats in my car. I am very thankful for the full service gas station. I am extremely grateful for the sweet man who pumped my gas tonight in the freezing cold while I sat in my warm car on my heated seat. I will soon be thankful for my warm bed that my hot-blooded hubby has already warmed up. If you've read the Twilight series - he runs werewolf temp. I'm a vampire.

grateful for sun

Today I am grateful for the bright southern sun that pours into the windows of our house during the winter. My favorite thing is to rip the shades up in the morning and let in all the light. It is good for the seasonal affective disorder soul.

grateful for the weekend

Ok, we ran out of time to blog yesterday, but it was because we got so much "weekend stuff" done. We are most grateful that I could work at my job at the barn teaching riding lessons (this gives us plane ticket money among paying for lots of the extras - dance lessons, clothes, Christmas, and fun things for the kids to name a few.) I'm grateful that I have a job that I can do when David is around to watch the girls and is totally flexible to our family's needs (not to mention a job I happen to LOVE doing.)

I know that David is MOST grateful that he installed the last window in the house. We've been working on replacing the original windows in our old house and the last was definitely a drafty antique above the kitchen sink. After a few hours and not too many hang ups, the new window is in and waiting for the trim pieces to go back on. He says thank you to Lyle for the saws all tool that came in very handy in cutting out some old wood. Here's to a warmer kitchen to cook and bake in this winter. Cheers!


Today we are grateful for an uninterrupted (well, not counting kids and dogs) afternoon to kick back and relax.

Today we are grateful for

*lunch date with the girls at McDonalds (you have to go there a lot when they have the toys of your kid's current favorite movie! But, as Hattie said when I buckled her in the car seat to leave: "yucky food.")
*playdate with Grace's new best friend, Aemon, from school. It was so great to meet his mom. She is so cool! I'm excited to get to know them better.
*60 degree weather, even if it is raining

Grace and Hattie are thankful for:

Today, Grace is thankful for:
Playing with her stuffed animals. That also means chim char and turtwig (pokemon characters.)
She is also thankful for her new Kung Fu Panda wii game that she saved for so long to buy. It's really hard to play. She's hoping to get better soon.

Hattie is thankful for Jesus. (seriously, that was the first thing she said and keeps saying it.) She is also thankful for a present and a baby.

I'm thankful my girls have a great daddy

I'm so thankful that David has so much time to spend with the girls and that he does use it to be with them. Here they are doing an advance step class on wii fit together. It is too funny.

The end of a legacy...

Outback that is. As I posted last month, on October 1, I was rear ended on my way home from work. The damage didn't seem too extensive but I was concerned that the insurance company was going to total my car after the body shop got into it. Alas, my worst fears were confirmed when 9 days after I had dropped my car off to be fixed, I got the dreaded phone call. After several rounds of negotiations over the value of my car I ended up accepting a value about $300 less than what I wanted and $1000 less than I think I could have gotten on the market if I had sold my car pre-accident.

It was unfortunate that my 1997 Outback was totaled. It was running great and although it had 143,000 miles on it, it had no mechanical issues and was still in pretty good cosmetic shape as well. We were hoping to hold on to it for another 2-3 years, but that obviously changed. Once I was notified of my car being totaled I had my rental car for 6 more days. I didn't want to be rushed into buying a car, but I also wanted to get it over with as Michelle and I didn't want to deal with the hassle of being a one car family. Perhaps if it had been summer we could have gotten by, but I wasn't looking forward to riding my bike to work in the cold and dark.

Michelle and I debated whether we should get a high mileage commuter or if we should get something a little more mid-life crisis-like (Jeep Rubicon here I come!!!). I started looking on the internet and noticed a gentle used 2008 as well as a L.L. Bean Edition 2005 Subaru Outback. I loved my Subaru and decided that replacing with another Subaru would be a prudent thing to do and fall somewhere in between the Honda Civic and the Jeep Rubicon. I stopped by the dealer on my way home from work and looked the '08 and ended up test driving the '05. I really liked it, but I wasn't about to spend that kind of cash without consulting Michelle first.

I got home and we ate dinner and decided that we should both go back and look at it. I sure the salesman though hook, line, and sinker as I walked in the same night now with my wife and two kids in tow. In the end I didn't get quite the deal I wanted, but I still think that I got a good deal on a vehicle that had gotten off a three-year lease. The L.L. Bean package adds some luxury that I didn't really need, but I am quite happy with my new car.

While I am still upset that I was rear-ended and it ended my '97 Legacy Outback's life prematurely, I am thankful that I was in a position to be able to buy another car. For the moment there is no eating in my new car and I have to park way out in the boonies, but if you want a nice ride just ask. Now if I can only get over bracing for impact every time I see a car coming up behind me.

Date Time

Today I had two dates. It has been awhile since I went on multiple dates in one day, but today I was lucky enough to go on two. Of course, unlike back in high school, this time it was Daddy/Daughter time. Since I had the day off from work (thanks to Veteran's Day) and so did Grace we had circled on our calendar an afternoon Daddy/Daughter date. Grace really wanted to see Madagascar 2 so off we went to our little local owned theater in Maynard. The movie was fun and I really enjoyed the penguins. It was too bad we didn't have more of them. After the movie we headed to the store for Grace to spend some of her allowance. She has been saving up for the last 5 months to purchase Kung Fu Panda for Wii. She finally had enough money so off we went. I spotted her the tax money (she still doesn't understand that one, but do any of us?) and back home we went.

Upon arriving home I was planning on playing the new game with Grace, but Hattie woke up and decided she needed Daddy time. So off on another date. This one wasn't so organized as Hattie wanted to take the dogs for a drive. We drove around and went to a store and then stopped at McDonalds for fries and a toy.

Once home I was a whopping $18 poorer, but richer from my experiences with Grace and Hattie.

staying up late/sleeping in

I'm thankful that I got to do my very favorite thing... stay up way late and stay in bed a long time this morning...

My book group regularly goes until midnight or beyond. Such was the case last night. We knew full well that no one had to get up for work or school this morning (they give full credit to Veteran's day here) so we weren't at all in a hurry to get home. Then, even after our kids got up at 6:30 am, David was nice enough to get them (and me!) breakfast and let me stay in bed. He even came back to bed and we snoozed the morning away all the while listening to Grace and Hattie destroy the house (announcing "this broken mommy"), dump toys, and empty book shelves into big piles. Cleaning up the mess was worth staying in bed until 10am!

grateful for leaves today

That is, I am grateful that the stinking leaves have finally all fallen from the stinking New England trees! As you can tell, I'm not a fan of the trees. I like trees in general. I know their purpose and I appreciate them. I majored in biology and can even lean towards the tree-hugging type, but, I hate their sheer volume here. When I came home from Salt Lake this summer and plunged into the dark green forest tunnels to drive home from the airport, I started crying and cried for more than a day that I was back in this claustrophobic, closed-in world.

Now, I can see some of the sky! Yay! We can also get rid of the leaves now that they have all fallen. Last year, we had an early, hard, and long winter. The snow fell before we got everything cleaned up, and the endless snow plow passes, scooped up all of the leaves from our dirt road and shot them to the side making a 1000 layer cemented sandwich of sand/leaves/sand/leaves in front of our fence. This took me 15 hours and 20 giant bags to clean up in the spring!

Today, I am grateful that I spent 1 hour and 6 bags and the front of our fence is now (mostly) leaf free! I just saved myself a week of work next spring! I am seriously elated. I know most people don't understand my joy, but, to all of you who think that living in this picturesque part of the country would be so lovely... just remember... those leaves are all so much nicer when they are firmly in place on a tree on a postcard!

Now, this is what the back-corner of our yard looks like. I didn't say we were done...

friends

I am thankful for friends. I know a lot of people but, there are few who turn out to be true friends. You can probably count yourself in the friend category if you read this blog. We have not made a lot of friends, especially as a couple, here in Massachusetts. But, we have really become close to the Doty family. They have gone from being fellow town residents to the people who we trade dog-sitting with to being the ones we know we can count on for anything and who are some of our favorite people to be with and to whom we are always, constantly indebted for some incredible thing they have done for us.

Our friends, the Dotys, lost their newborn baby this week and buried him yesterday. The details are many. I hate talking about this kind of thing on my blog when I know it's not my story to tell. But, their loss has consumed my entire week and wrenched my soul so it has become part of my story too. As hard as it was to attend all of the events yesterday, I was so grateful to be there for everything, to be invited to be there for everything, and again, to call them my friends. There is nothing greater than having true friends in times like these no matter which end you are on - the giving or receiving end.
So again, I am grateful for friends.

I'm thankful for...

I'm thankful for the present. I think one of the main reasons so many people (including myself at times) are unhappy is because they spend too much time thinking about the past or planning for the future. In reality it is the precious moments of today that we need to enjoy. I promise to enjoy the moments with Grace and Harriet even if it means I only get a sliver of the bed and get no sleep, or missing the big game while playing "babies" or Uno, or playmobil, or whatever. I also promise to enjoy the moments as they happen. I hope that you will too.

go utes!

Today I am thankful that the Utes won last night. For David's sake and mine, I'm so glad we didn't stay up until midnight and pay to watch the game on a horrible internet feed to see them lose in a miserable game and have to go to bed in a huff. Now, I just feel bad for the poor kid who missed the field-goal kicks for TCU.

leapin' leopards

Grace and Hattie are taking a turn to say what they are thankful for today:

Grace is thankful for her new webkins leopard that she got in Salt Lake. He is her new best stuffed pal. She sleeps with him and takes him everywhere.

Hattie says that she is thankful for Grace. She does love and idolize her big sis and tries to do everything that Grace does. She misses her all morning when Grace is at kindergarten. I know that she is also thankful for mo-deb's house today because she has been asking to go there all day long.

This is just a cute picture of Hattie, Grace and her leopard, and Sean at mo-deb's house.

my girls

today, I am thankful for my healthy, beautiful, smart, and funny girls.

NaBloPoMo

That stands for National Blog Posting Month, or something like that. Some of our fellow bloggers really get into it. You are supposed to make one post a day for the entire month of November. As I commented on our friend Jared's blog, I think NaBloPoMo is just a wasteful blog clog. It turns into too many random and useless entries that for people like me, end up taking up too much room when I try to make my blog into a book for a meaningful family journal.

Well, we've already blown it as we haven't blogged every day this month and it's only the 5th. But, I was thinking as I was doing dishes... what if I blog something I'm grateful for every day (from now on) during November since it is Thanksgiving and all? To all of you NaBloPoMo fans out there, I challenge you to do the same if you don't have something meaningful to post every day.

Here's my first one: Today, I am grateful that Harriet hasn't had a major meltdown (yet) today and that my girls have been getting along all morning. (Grace's school was closed for voting, so she's home for the day.)

Your turn.

quick Halloween pics

Here are a few quick pictures for family who want to see our munchkins on Halloween. We went trick-or-treating in 2 neighborhoods. We have some friends in our town who live in a cul-de-sac, perfect for trick-or-treating at 4:30pm. So, we ran around with their little rugrats for an hour.

(Grace and her friend Jacki)

Then, we came home to have a pizza dinner with Daddy and go visit our handful of neighbors who we knew were waiting to see our kids in costume. It turned out to be a warm night, so I let Hattie wear the Tinkerbell outfit again. I had Grace's old Eeyore waiting in the wings in case it was cold. She was really too funny. I asked her which one she wanted to wear as we were getting ready and she said "um, I think I want to be, Cinderella!" Well, I had the makings for that costume too - we have a pretty good dress-up wardrobe, but she stuck with being a fairy in the end.

Our favorite houses on our road are of course, Roger and Jeanne's house, and now, a teacher at Grace's school lives across the street with some girlfriends. Grace was MOST excited to go trick-or-treating at her place. Jeanne's family was too funny. We rang the doorbell to find them all dressed up and ready to go finish the neighborhood with us. Silly "Grandma Jeanne"! She was such a trooper to make it up all the long and steep driveways on our road.
ps - we had a record 6 trick-or-treaters at our house, including Jeanne! We gave out FULL size candy bars hoping that the word will get out and more people will come to our neighborhood :-)