All decorated

 Thanksgiving evening is one of my favorite nights of the year! After we clean up all of our turkey mess and put away all of our pilgrims, we get out the tree and all of our Christmas decorations and begin decking the Halls!

I feel like after 30 years of marriage we have quite a great collection!

I love how everyone gets involved!

This year it was Micah's turn to choose the theme of the tree and he chose gold, red, and green. Very traditional and very beautiful! I was super happy to still find an army guy stuck in the tree. This has been Silas's tradition ever since he was a toddler and loved watching Toy Story. I can't imagine a Christmas Tree without some army guys hidden in it. 

And then I got to top the tree with the star. This time it was a little star which made us giggle.

 So beautiful and so festive. I just love it! Lots of memories made here for sure.

Thanksgiving Day!

 wow! I'm behind on my posting! But I'm getting there! 

Thanksgiving was  wonderful! We set up our table the night before. It's always fun to move around the furniture to fit an extra table!

That morning we play games and cook together.

We are so blessed to be joined by family and friends this Thanksgiving!

As you can see my boys are really getting taller!

We enjoy sitting around and talking, especially about how good God has been to us!

See what I mean?

Then Patrick carves the turkeys. I always make a turkey and Tabitha always makes one too. She's so sweet! She always wants to make sure that we have plenty of leftovers. She has a third turkey roasting at her house so that their family will have left overs too. She's amazing like that! The best daughter-in-law ever!

And then we start filling our plates!

 After we sit down we go around the table sharing Scripture and talk about what we are thankful for. I know I took a picture of all of us around the table but now I cannot find it! But I know it was a good day and we enjoyed one another. God has been so good. We are so blessed!!

What do you do the night before Thanksgiving?

 You go on a hayride of course! Hay is optional 🙂

You giggle and laugh as you bump along the road.

You enjoy the cooler temperatures!

 And make memories all along the way!

A day early?

 This year we decided to do things a little differently. Normally, we have a huge Thanksgiving lunch on Thanksgiving Day. We enjoy family and friends. We have pie and go for a walk. And then we get our tree after our Thanksgiving meal. 

Well, the tree lot that we normally go to seems to get more expensive each year. We decided that this year we just didn't want to put that much money into a tree that we would let our goats eat 4 weeks later. 

So, we decided that we would buy a cheaper tree the day before Thanksgiving. We wouldn't decorate it that day, but we would least have our tree ready to go for Thanksgiving night. 

Honestly, not everyone was on board with this idea. But as we went to look for our tree and then got a McDonald's lunch and had hot cocoa together, we just had a wonderful day! It was nice the day before a busy Thanksgiving to have some time together. I think we found a new tradition!

It didn't go as easily as we thought picking out a tree would be. But that's how it is every year, of course! We went to five different places that sold trees and finally settled on one at Lowe's. 

What a great day we had together!
 

Getting the biggest turkey

 We had fun trying to find the biggest turkey this year! We dug through the freezer section and lifted them all and giggled and laughed and stood in the way of everybody, probably. 

In the end our biggest turkey we could find was almost 16 lb. Not quite big enough for this family of ours. 🙂 We bought it anyway and then Brenna ended up finding another one for 20 lb at Publix so she traded with us. So thankful for this family of mine!

 

A quick trip to say happy birthday Dad!

 I've said before many times on this blog, but anytime I get a chance to drive down and see my mom and dad I just love it! This time Beth, Micah, Callie and I brought along Brenna, Asa, and Azariah. We had so much fun!!

As you're going to see in these pictures, Asa was in love with his grandpa! Anywhere he was that's where he wanted to be.  Anything he did that's what he wanted to do. They bonded immediately and we loved it!

We had a great birthday party for Dad with our family and celebrated other November birthdays too. 

Micah asked my mom if she would teach him how to make Sherry's famous fried chicken. It was delicious! My boy is really learning how to cook.

And then we went down for a couple quick hours at the beach. It went by fast but we loved it! Asa and Azariah had never been to the beach so that was fun too. I love the sand, the seagulls, the water, just everything about the beach!

Then for Dad's birthday lunch I asked if I could take him and my mom out to lunch. Just us three. When's the last time it was like that?? 

We went to Skyline which Dad and I love! Mom just tolerates it but loved being with us🙂

And then we were able to be at Winkler Road Baptist Church with my parents that night. 

It was a great trip, went by too fast, as usual, but we made some wonderful memories!
 

The Presidential Election

 When I started this past summer planning for our school year, I knew I wanted us to do a government unit that included a study on the election process. Since it's a presidential election year, it was the perfect time to do it!

I found a great unit made by Sonlight that we loved! It was very thorough, had a lot of great history and a lot of great vocabulary and we all learned a lot. Me especially!

The day of the election we printed out a poster of the United States.

Then I had Silas, Callie, and Micah fill in the electoral votes that each state would receive.

Then we headed off to our polling location to cast our votes! Well, at least me and Beth cast our votes. Patrick had voted earlier in the week.

Even Hobbes got in the patriotic spirit!

That night we prepared a ton of snacks and watched as results came in. If a state-turned blue or red I had the kids fill in the right color.

It was quite a nail biting night wasn't it?

But then got really exciting too! We were doing a lot of praying!

We are so thankful for the results and for for America voting in Donald Trump. We are also thankful that our state stayed conservative, especially on amendment three and four. We had some pretty big things on our ballot this year!

 To God be the glory, great things he hath done!