Feasting Fun

I recently had the realization that I've taken part in 4 preschool Thanksgiving feasts (including this year) and only have 2 left. Where is the time going?!?

This year, we had two days of feasting. Leah's class had their party and feast on Wednesday and Joel's class did their's on Friday. It is always so fun to see the kids dressed up with their headpieces, singing Thanksgiving themed songs, and eating a full Thanksgiving meal at school! We are so thankful for the work that their teachers put into making every holiday so special for the kids.

Our Thanksgiving fun continued the following week with waaay too much food and plenty of quality family time. Grandma Sue came up for a day and brought a yummy Thanksgiving meal that we shared for lunch. Later that day, we ventured over to Grandpa and Grandma Lamont's house for a huge meal with (most of) the Lamont clan. Not only do we have tons of great food, but there is always plenty of laughter and fun. We are so thankful for an amazing extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins who love to be together!

All We Want for Christmas....

At some point, during the last few years, we started this not-so-fun-for-the-adults-but-the-kids-love-it tradition of putting together Christmas lists using the toy catalogs that get sent out weeks upon weeks before the Christmas season should even start. Our kids drool for hours over these catalogs and go on and on about all the things they want. From our perspective, most of those "must-haves" are things that we KNOW they will play with for a few weeks and then forget about by mid-January. Yet, we succumb to their pleading and allow them to cut out the pictures of their favorite things and they get to fit all their desires onto two sheets. We are sure to give them many reminders about the fact that they won't get everything on those lists and they seem to have been okay with that each year. The plus side to the whole project is the humor that comes with seeing the random items that they think they want, but truly have no clue what it even does. This year, Joel took the award for the most ridiculous list. An outsider might have actually thought his list belonged to Leah. Can you tell they spend every waking moment playing together and Leah calls the shots?!?

Halloween 2014

 Another fun-filled Halloween is in the books! The kids had a great time celebrating this year:

Caleb got to go to a trunk-or-treat with Nana Pam (Leah was at a birthday party and Joel was napping). He had a ton of fun and enjoyed bringing home our first batch of candy! 

We had a blast carving pumpkins with family and friends who might as well be family (Nana Pam and Ed). The kids are all so great about digging in and getting messy. Not that I enjoy de-staining orange clothes, but it is nice that my kiddos aren't weirded out by the icky feel of the pumpkin guts! 

 

The kids all celebrated Halloween at school. The preschoolers trick-or-treated throughout the building and brought home way too many trinkets, treasures, and treats! Caleb had a party at school (where I didn't have a minute to take pics because we only had a half hour to cram in tons of fun stuff).

I found some great Halloween crafts on clearance at Michaels and the kids had fun with those (thanks to the ever-so-crafty TiTi for helping). It was a great way to distract them from asking all afternoon about when trick-or-treating would start.

After we all got bundled up, we headed out with our neighbors for almost an hour of freezing cold trick-or-treating. The kids stayed quite warm because they ran and ran and ran and ran from house to house. Fun was had by all! 

And Halloween wouldn't be complete without the traditional candy-sorting lesson given by TiTi. We ended up with WAY too much candy!