It’s after Thanksgiving and you know what that means! Tree decorating time… I’ll share pictures later of everything else, but here’s the tree, all decorated by the kids and the little girl next door. They had a fabulous time!
And here’s an action shot of the little tree getting decorated:
Thank you to my decorators, who did the WHOLE thing themselves this year!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you all have a restful and pleasant time with your family and friends. To those outside of the US or otherwise not celebrating, neener neener, we get 2 days off 
This is from last year… the song they learned in Kinder… lyrics are:
Mr Turkey, Mr. Turkey,
Run away, Run away,
If you don’t be careful,
You will be a mouthful
On Thanksgiving Day,
Thanksgiving Day
And wow, Cassie’s speech has improved a LOT in the past year… sigh, she’s also grown up a lot in just one year.
Every year the school holds an assembly and it’s the same basic program, each grade sings a song, you bring you along any family member that may be a Veteran and get to introduce them, yadda yadda. It’s about 90 minutes long and I usually take photos for the yearbook or anyone that wants one (next time, I’m totally asking for my own chair and to be able to use my tripod so I can get less blurry shots!). I’m thinking if I ask to rig up lights they might look at me funny.
Anyway, Tom was in the Navy so he always goes. He had to sub that day so he had to leave his class during it and go up on stage so the kids could introduce him. Cassie was QUITE proud of herself this year and Jamie wasn’t nervous at all. Good job kids!
I do sometimes wish they’d vary the program. And next year, I’m gonna bring my own chair. And that tripod if they want photos for the yearbook :p
If you are at my kid’s school and your child was on stage, I more than likely got their photo, check my Flickr account (and if there’s a photo on there you don’t want me to have up, let me know and I’ll remove it)
My mean mother-in-law made me be somewhere with both kids reasonably awake, dressed and happy on a Saturday at 9:20 in a mall not near me. *laugh* (hehehe… kidding, Jennifer – for those that don’t know, I actually get along really well with Tom’s family – thank goodness, some people aren’t so lucky)… the pictures turned out really well and all the kids were in a good mood (which as you all know helps) so it really was the perfect time – plus NO one else was there so we had the run of the place. With Jamie that’s a really good thing – he doesn’t do crowds really well. I hadn’t actually thought about that aspect of it so I’m really glad we chose that time. (I’ll do a post later, but I’m reading a book called The Explosive Child which I think is more of what is “wrong” with Jamie these days than some mental or emotional disorder). Jamie literally told me at first “I’m not doing it” (I mean, he’s 9, he’s way too cool for this ya know!) so I had to bribe him and he cooperated pretty well. He’s not much for “pretty smiles”, he’s more goofy so it was hard for him but he really did do a great job! These are the ones I liked best. I tend to like photos that aren’t so posed, looking straight at the camera or too cutesy and I was happy with how these turned out:
I LOVE this photo of them together. It’s so how they operate…
This one of Cassie captures her attitude perfectly!
Okay, I broke my own “cutesy” rule, but really, tell me you wouldn’t buy this!
And, the group shot that Grandma wanted for her holiday cards this year…
They wanted to show off their costumes….
My leopard and underworld outcast. Jamie was clowning around. I was laughing too hard to get a real picture. Oh well. Still really cute… better pictures later. Maybe. If I remember.
Jamie’s birthday is next weekend (10/17) and he is having a Halloween costume party. I kinda thought from our previous conversations he was going to have just 2 friends and him to go to Dave & Busters. I was looking forward to not doing the whole party thing, but this is going to be fun. Tom is making cupcakes with a chocolate skull on top with blood dripping off of it. Heh.
We had a fantasic Easter. We had a few families over and we had ham and turkey and sides and desserts and the kids got to hunt eggs and we had a great time just relaxing and “being”. The kids all got to play together. It was quite the fun to watch them all looking for eggs and they all were good about the “9 eggs each” rule (we had some mixed ages). It didn’t matter though. They were all so good!
I truly have the best friends here in Austin. I honestly don’t know what I did to deserve these ladies, but sitting there talking with them I quickly realized just how lucky I am to have them. Amazingly enough, all of our kids get along pretty well too. It’s weird!
We had a great time on Easter weekend. I’ll have pictures tomorrow of the party we held and details, and the post before this one showed the neighborhood egg hunt… but what did we do inbetween?
We had fun! The kids dyed eggs…
And they filled the plastic eggs to get them ready for our party…
And, yes, the Easter Bunny came. He brought a DS game, a solid chocolate bunny, sand toys (for our vacation!), a toothbrush and toothpaste. Jamie was being kind of a butthead about the camera, so no pictures of him.
I hope you all had a very Happy Easter!
(and at least I didn’t wait 3 months to post pics, eh?)
Our neighborhood puts on an Easter egg hunt every year and every year we’ve had other plans (one year we actually all overslept!). But this year… this year, we were gonna go… and we did! We had a great time! It was a bit chilly, but the kids didn’t care. I must admit there wasn’t much hunting to it, just eggs thrown on the ground in areas that were roped off by age group, but it was a great time – and they had free hot dogs and stuff, so the kids dug it. I, of course, took some pictures
We left 45 minutes early so we could walk over to the park and let the kids play for a while, but I had the time wrong, so we were an hour and 15 minutes early. By the time the started putting the eggs out, the kids were pretty hyped up… they climbed up on a rock to talk about strategy…
The areas are roped off my 2 year increments so they were in separate areas, there were plenty of eggs and plenty of kids. I was actually impressed out well put together the whole thing was… here’s Jamie lined up…
I took a few quick photos while they were waiting…
… and waiting (excruciating when you are six and eight!)
… and finally the hunt was on
I love our neighborhood!
I promise, this is the last of them from 2008 *laugh* At least I think so…
We always make sure to sprinkle reindeer food…
Santa went WAY overboard this year… of course. The big gift this year was the game systems for the kiddos. Ninetindo DS 
Santa was a bit silly… he faked the kids out and made them think he didn’t get the ONE game they asked for… Santa hid it WAY DOWN in the toe of the stockings. Silly Santa!
