Thanksgiving (and a little more)!

Again this year we headed to Cleveland to Gramma & Papaw's house for Thanksgiving. Each year we seem to have less and less people -- we missed Uncle Jon who is living in Florida and Aunt Mel who was visiting her fiance's family. We did enjoy the addition of Uncle Rick (Papaw's younger brother) this year. He usually visits my grandfather in Tennessee, so we haven't been able to share the holiday with him for quite a few years.

We always enjoy sitting around talking after stuffing ourselves!

Anna & Stephen (my brother & his girlfriend)

Uncle Rick, Gramma & Papaw

After the ladies cleaned up, we enjoyed some Pumpkin and Chocolate Pie. My mom is so kind to make Rick a Chocolate Pie since he doesn't care for pumpkin.

The girls are anxiously awaiting to get their piece of pie!


Makenna spent a lot of time over the holiday making cards. Gramma has a huge stash of envelopes, so Makenna would draw pictures and write notes to everyone.

Makenna was proud of the turkey she made at school. She didn't believe me when I called it Tom Turkey even after I told her to ask Papaw what name people give the turkey and he told her the same thing. She wanted to call it Kaylee, so pictured is Kaylee Turkey!

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This will prove a few of Madi's quirks . . . our first snow she asked me if she could go shovel. Being a bad mother, I told her to wait until later (honestly, because I didn't have the time to stop and bundle her up, undress her and help get her hot chocolate when she came in). She wasn't too happy when the snow melted off the grass before she was allowed to go outside. As you can see by the pictures, she had to get the snow off all the steps on the swingset and climb up to get the snow off the very top of the slide. There was a little snow left on the porch, so she was able to shovel that. A couple days later, she asked to go shovel again. I figured I better let her go out before the snow melted and she got upset again. She had been outside for a little while playing with the cat and "shoveling" everything -- at one point I noticed her knocking snow off the strawberry plants. I happened to look near the swingset as I turned around and saw she had shoveled a square, yes a square in the snow! I asked her about it and she walked over, so I was able to take her picture. Priceless!

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Isaiah has been enjoying playing with the remote controlled My Little Pony Scooter Madi received for a birthday present. He isn't quite skilled to make it go in a specific direction, but he gets a kick out of watching it spin in circles and run into things. He likes the horn too (which drives his father crazy)!

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For her birthday, Madi received an activity book. It teaches the skills of using scissors. She gets very determined while she is working and is thrilled with the outcome. The first couple times she was frustrated, but she soon got the hang of it and loves to cut and make pictures.

Any parent will agree, sleeping children are adorable! I couldn't pass up taking a picture. I let her sleep in and paid for it that night come bed time. She wasn't tired when we laid the kids down, but we made her be quite so she didn't wake the others. She read books for a while and wanted to get up off the couch for any reason. I finally told her to lay on the couch and close her eyes. She couldn't lay still and finally ended up on the floor. (For some reason she really likes the floor -- she usually sleeps on the floor in her room.) I happened to look over after a while and noticed she had fallen asleep.