Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving we spent as just our family, and we always go to the movies, so we were able to go Thanksgiving Day this year to see The Good Dinosaur. Our theater recently installed fully reclining seats. It's awesome now, it was such a fun outing. Not our favorite movie by Disney, but it was cute. The kids all loved the recliners.

 

 



Parade

Sidney's dance studio participated in the Boise Holiday Parade. She was excited to ride on a float, but when we got there and saw it was just a trailer being pulled by a truck, she was a little disappointed. We've come a long way from the bigger cities, and had to laugh when one group was pushing shopping carts. I get it was for the Salvation Army, but it was still funny. For being a decent size city, it's a far cry from other big city parades we've been to. I'm not sure how much she enjoyed sitting on the float, but I think next year we'll just go and watch.

 

 



Thanksgiving

We spent Thanksgiving in Seattle with Josh's family.  It was a fun week, but I took pictures only a couple of times.  Mostly because we didn't really do anything but sit around and hang out, and drive from place to place, but it was fun anyway.  My mom came up for the baptism, so we hung out with her for a day.  We went to a museum, ate at the Old Spaghetti Factory, and explored downtown Tacoma.

Next door is a glass museum that we didn't go to, but the walk to it was really cool.  The bridge takes you over the freeway and there are all these crazy glass sculptures filling the ceiling and lining the walls.

 

Another day we went on a fairy ride with Jared and Annette.  And the rest of the week was not captured by pictures.  I'm seriously so bad at taking pictures these days.



Fall in Houston

I made a discovery a couple of days ago.  Houston has Fall!  I figured out I'm living in the wrong part.  Seriously, there are two trees at the entrance of my neighborhood that changed color, not a single other one has.  And when you drive out of the neighborhood, there is no color.  To make it worse, the trees that were there have been cut down to make room for another neighborhood.  So anyway, we were out the other day and drove past a neighborhood that had the brightest, most gorgeous trees of every color.  We sidetracked and drove through for a few minutes.  Just what I needed, it was beautiful.  I guess we just chose the wrong area of Houston to live in.  A few weeks ago we created our own Fall in our house.  It was the most of the season we had seen so far.  Houston is a little late with Fall.  While much of the country is being blasted with snowstorms, last week it was still 80 degrees.  This week is in the 50s, which we are loving!  I like change.  I crave the changing seasons, and living in endless summer is draining to my soul. Some people love the endless summer.  I'm not one of them.

This is our Thanksgiving tree we do every year.



Turkey Time

My kids have been singing a "Turkey Time" song and it's stuck in my head.  We try to keep our traditions alive as best we can during the holidays, but we have a lot of traditions we have broken over the years due to our many moves.  I think the one tradition we have kept has been going strong for 12 years now.  We spent our first Thanksgiving together while we were dating, and ever since then we have not spent a single one with the same people.  We have spent it with random family members (it's been 7 years since we had it with any family), various friends, alone, and at restaurants.  Let's see how long we can keep it going.

 

We've had a great weekend so far.  I think every week should have 4 day weekends.  We've gotten a lot done around the house and managed to have fun.  Something we started last year was this tree.  Throughout the month we added things we are thankful for.

The kids have been dying to rake up the leaves with Josh.  They spent hours raking and playing in the enormous pile.  We get a lot of leaves from our neighbor's trees.

 Their favorite part was burying Josh and watching him burst out of the pile.

 

We broke out the Christmas decorations and went to cut down our tree.  We can't figure out if Josh isn't allergic to any of the tree types, so we just got the same as last year and put it in a different room.  We don't get to see it as much, it's not by the fire, and it overpowers the room it's in, but he's not suffering like last year, so we'll make do.  Maybe we'll go back to a fake one someday.  We also went to the movies, our tradtion since I was pregnant with Sidney.

 This year Jayden got to help chop it down.

 Josh helped put on the lights and then stood back to watch me and my little helpers.  Poor guy and those dang allergies!

 

Thanksgiving Weekend

I don't think I've ever really blogged about our Thanksgivings.  We have a couple of traditions, and I realized this year that without meaning to, one of them is that we have never spent a single one with the same people.  We were dating during our first one, so in all I think we've had 11 of them together.  Crazy thought.  But we always have great company and food, and this year was no exception.  Another tradition that we started when I was pregnant with Sidney was to go out to a movie.  We took Jayden to the theater for the first time and he loved it, so we've done it every year since.  We started out going on Thanksgiving day, but now we just try to go sometime during the weekend.  Then when we moved to the south and the weather was still nice enough to be outside, we started either going to the zoo or for a hike or something like that.  So this year we went to Andrew Jackson State Park for a picnic and hike.  It was a perfect day.  We didn't even need jackets.

In the visitor's center Jayden wanted his picture taken in front of everything.  He's been doing this a lot lately, it's kind of funny.  It was so important to him.

So of course Sidney needed her picture taken too.

On our hike I asked Sidney if she liked the forest.  She said, "No.  It's spoooooky!" 

At the lake we fed the ducks.  They were really entertaining. 

Josh had them flying up to eat out of his hand.  That was really cool.