Thanksgiving

We were lucky this year to have my parents with us during Thanksgiving.  It was low key, but fun to have them here.  They left this afternoon and we are missing them already!

Hailey was in charge of the decorations and had a great time creating the turkey centerpiece, name places and napkin rings.  We love her creativity.

 Apparently, Andrew loves mashed potatoes!

 An extremely familiar sight...my Dad cleaning.  :)

 Our "thankful tree"...the kids were writing down what they were thankful for.

 Fun and games...arm wrestling.

 My dad was a sport and wrestled with the kids for a long time.  He and Hailey kept trading insults, but she quickly backed down when the "big bear" took down the "little mosquito" (a scene that is reminiscent of my own childhood).

He even took Carter to the mat. 

Showing her tough attitude.

Cruise 2012

One of our favorite activities is going on cruises especially with family.  This November, we were able to go on a cruise with some of Chris' family.  His sister Janene and her husband Curtis, his brother Ben and his wife Shani, and his brother Spencer and his wife Bonnie all went with us.  We had such a wonderful time just hanging out with them and had the added bonus of going to Honduras, Mexico and Belize.  We had a great time with activities like zip lining, cave tubing, ATV riding, snorkeling, creating our own scavenger hunt, learning napkin folding, hip hop dancing, various circus tricks, shuffle board, playing multiple games and most of all talking excessively about everything.  We are ready to go again with them any time.  Thanks to Shani, we have hundreds of pictures to remind us of our fabulous time, but I'll only post a couple.

 The three brothers.  Can you see the resemblance??

 Chris and his sister, Janene, the only sister on the trip.

 The back of the ship.  The water was SO blue!

 The boy table at lunch.  What a great group.

The girls

Alyssa turns 3

Alyssa turned 3 and she is such a sweet girl.  She was so excited to open gifts that she just tore threw them.  It wasn't until afterwards that she actually noticed what she got and started playing.

 With her sister and 2 brothers.

Dressed up Rapunzel with her new dolls.

Halloween

This is a little late, but I'm catching up...

 Minnie, Cheerleader and Train Engineer

 Baseball player (it was nice that we had everything already!), Andrew's ultra creative shirt that said "costume" (my eyes rolled more at seeing him than ever before!), cheerleader, train engineer and Minnie.

 Chris and I even dressed up which is unusual.

 Grant and Chris were a team on pumpkin carving.  This was Grant's creation.

 The girl team.

The two older boys chose to carve a ghost.  Fun times.