Thanksgifts

A bit late, but wanted to recap our Thanksgiving for you. One of the books I have been impacted by the most in the last year is Ann Voskamp's 1,000 Gifts. She is a gifted writer who has been transformed by practicing gratitude...day in and day out, in the midst of the mundane and tragic and everything in between. So I have been trying (but often forgetting ) to practice this more and more (she had a goal of listing her 1000 gifts or things she was thankful for) and of course the Thanksgiving holiday is a great reminder of that. The boys had a thankfulness notebook that we wrote in during the month of November (not as consistently as I hoped, but that is reality these days). The boys had lots of things they were thankful for, including things like Jupiter's red spot, friends, turkey, Mei Mei, space, Christmas, pizza and so on. It was fun to do together.  I am super thankful for especially the people God has gifted me with in family and friends and our community here.  Here are some pictures of our special day of Thanksgiving as well.

 Lucy all decked out in her favorite color- purple. She is SO girly these days and loves to wear purple, eat out of her purple bowl, drink out of her purple cup, etc.

 These cuties held hands almost the whole walk from our house to the Staeges' where we had Thanksgiving dinner.

 Mmmm, turkey. Actually, mostly she ate Therese's delicious rolls, while Chris and I enjoyed full plates of lots of delicious food.

 One of the kids' tables. Our neighborhood of four families, plus one other family from church (who have one kid) now totals 13 children!  

I printed some Thanksgiving coloring pages off in hopes of some quieter activity during the night...it worked for a short time.

We are now full into the Christmas season...we decorated last weekend (mostly) and the calendar seems to be filling up at an alarming pace. We are also happily anticipating Nana and Bop's visit. They land here on December 18!