November

Thanksgiving was a little sad for me this year.  With all of my family in Michigan and Florida, and Tim's parents in Texas, it was pretty quiet.  We did get invited to have Thanksgiving with some friends, which we did.  We had fun and it was so nice of them to have us over, but it was still a bit of a struggle for me not to have any of my extended family around.  It was a good chance to think about what we are thankful for, though.  Its hard for me to really appreciate and be properly thankful for a healthy family, a warm house, the jobs we have.  So easy to take those big things for granted. 

 I was also thankful that I got almost 2 weeks away from subbing since Tim's mom went out of town.  It was very relaxing to only have to worry about taking care of the kids and the house and not rushing out to schools in the mornings.   

 I did take some of that time to do some Christmas shopping and to do some mystery shopping.  It was a nice opportunity to earn some extra cash.  We are going to use it to replace our portable dvd player which broke a few weeks ago.  It is almost a necessity in our house on long car trips, airplane rides, or for poor Ezra who has to sit for very long periods in gyms for wrestling right now.  I even went to Walmart for black Thursday sales to get a new player, and was there for 3 hours in the craziness (never done that before, probably will never do it again) only to get it home and realize it doesn't have a battery you can charge.  That is one of the functions we needed.  I didn't do enough research.  Thankfully Walmart took it back 2 days later.  We are going with a different model from Best Buy.

I did find these nifty photo holders at Kohls.  We are using them to put spelling lists/memory verses/etc at a place on the table where the kids can see them while they are eating.  This bit of organization is really helping me not lose those important papers and is helping the learning happen more easily.  Ezra is learning our address and cell phone numbers!

We also are still surprised to find how long the leaves stay on the trees out here.  Our fall leaves were finally all down and we did the final cleanup this weekend.  I still can't believe we were raking leaves in December!  So nice to have it done though.  My arms are still sore today from the weekend's work.  We also have been surprised to find several of the mornings this last week to see a hummingbird at our feeder in our window!  We looked online and discovered that there is one kind, Anna's hummingbird, that stays here all year.  I will be filling my feeder today so she will keep coming back!