Thanksgiving

We had a great Thanksgiving this year.  We started it off with a Family Night where we made this thankful tree.  We started telling our kids that they had to be more specific and it really helped to get us all thinking about the little things that we're thankful for

We hosted the big event and had all of the Atkin families together.  It was nice having everyone come to us!  It was a tight squeeze here but we made it work.  We had Thanksgiving dinner with Marsha and had some time with Tom and Lorna over the weekend, too.  

I was a terrible photographer but thankfully others picked up the slack for me.  These are mostly from other people's cameras.

Yes we did resort to some electronic babysitting, sadly:

I did look around a few times during the weekend to notice how many of us were on our phones. We all took turns harassing each other about getting off.  What's family for, after all? :)

We took turns loving on these chubby babies:

We worked like mad getting the food on the table:

Jon was a champ and carved both turkeys.  I'm not sure if his hands ever recovered.

Finally it was time to eat:

I made this fun little guessing game:

I got everyone who was there for Thanksgiving except Shari.  If I would have thought of it sooner we could have probably tracked one down but of course I was doing it the night before.  The game ended up being a lot harder than I thought.  Some people didn't even recognize themselves or their own kids.  Jon won with the most correct--I think he got 24.

We had fun over at Tom and Shari's on Saturday night with Tom and Lorna.  We ate pizza, watched the BYU games and played games:

I love how absorbed Joe and Tom are in the basketball game that we had on mute. :)

It was such a fun weekend!

Little Things

I wanted to catch up on some of the little things that have been going on...

First of all, Elijah learned to climb out of his crib so we decided to take it down and put him in a big boy bed!

His siblings were probably more excited about it than he was.

He really has done great with it,  Some nights he harasses Nate and tries to get into his bed (which Nate doesn't appreciate much) but mostly he goes right to sleep, even for naps.

Speaking of Elijah, he sure can be a troublemaker these days!  I was so excited to be done with our carpeted dining area in our last house, but I didn't realize the ramifications this change would have.  Eli can now push our dining chairs around the kitchen and climb up to get whatever he wants.  It drives me crazy!  I feel like I'm constantly putting him down and putting chairs back.

His whining has also been driving me crazy.  I've never really done this whiny, almost 2 year-old stage with a mostly non-verbal child and I feel like it's a whole new level of craziness.  I'm trying not to respond to the whining, and constant "Ma!"'s, and make him say please (he signs it) but it's not making much of a difference yet.  He's slowly starting to say more words, though, so there is hope.

Here are some of his new words:

-"Zi-zee": Lizzy

-"Kee": blankie

-"ice": ice water (he's his mother's child :)

-"bye"

-"no": his favorite word

-"uh, Mama": this is how he says thank you to me for something.

-"buh-ball": football, or basketball, or baseball, etc...

He still does a lot of motioning for what he wants and he still says "uh" for yes.  One thing that we all love is when he says prayers.  This is how it goes:

Joe or I: Dear Heavenly Father...

Eli: uh

Joe or I: Thank you...

Eli: uh

Joe or I: for this day...

Eli: uh

You get the idea.  It cracks us all up.  At least it's a start.

All of this toddler craziness prompted me to take this picture one day:

There's something about a sleeping child that makes you forgive everything they do when they're awake.

We took the older three kids and drove out to Boise for the BYU/Boise State game.  The game was seriously depressing but we still managed to have fun.  

Nate was having fun hanging out on these rails:

We stayed until the bitter end of the game and it paid off since we got a chance to meet Cosmo:

Hopefully the next game we go to turns out a little better.

I've still been loving the sunsets here:

And sunrises, too:

That one was from a morning run.  Those have been so good for my soul.  Sadly, the weather has changed and it's much colder now.  Hopefully I can still fit some of those in if I get bundled up.

The kids were so excited when we got our first snow:

It turned into quite the snowstorm and after super-low temperatures over the night, there was a lot of ice.  We got a message in the morning that school was canceled!

Snow day!

We had a fun day at home all day.  We made these cute turkeys for our Thanksgiving jar:

Elizabeth and Natalie had their very first lesson with their new piano teacher.  She mentioned that she was having a recital and asked if they wanted to play some of the songs they already knew.  They agreed and they did a great job!

They both even let me curl their hair for once:

It made me so happy. :)  I don't like how beautiful these two are.  Not one bit... :)
 Eli wanted his picture taken, too, and was hamming it up:

We went out for frozen yogurt after (even though it was freezing outside!)...

Elizabeth got the sweetest package from her teacher and her old class one day:

I was just blown away by his thoughtfulness and generosity.  It was such a boost to her during this difficult time of being the new kid and trying to make new friends.

Speaking of Elizabeth, she joined a swim team.  It's pretty relaxed--they don't really race each other during the meets, just try to improve their times.

 Here's some shots from her first meet (she's in the closest lane in each of these):

 

I wanted to record how we do our cleaning these days.  I've never been very good at getting cleaning done throughout the week.  It's hard enough just staying on top of the kitchen mess every day.  I do better when I have a time set aside to really hit it hard.  So, awhile back we instituted Saturday jobs.  Our kids have come to expect them now and generally do pretty well.  They are getting better and better at actually cleaning well, too, especially Elizabeth.  She mopped the whole kitchen/dining/entry area one day and it was the first time I thought it was as good as I could have done.

Here's an example:

I post it and the kids pick what they want.  Joe was gone that Saturday and the kids actually did really well.  It always feels good to have a clean house, at least for a couple of hours.... :)

Here's another mom victory I wanted to post:

My kids LOVE kale chips!  It's pretty funny watching them scarf them down straight from the pan.  Here's the recipe we use.  At least it's one way that I can make sure we all eat some veggies.

House Projects

We've been working hard since we moved in to get some projects done, a lot of which have been many years coming.  There's nothing like moving into a new house to motivate us to get stuff done!  

One big priority was a garden space.  Joe and I have both had the dream of having a big garden and lots of fruit trees for awhile now.  We've made some attempts, and have benefited from some mature fruit trees at different houses, but what with moving every year and renting often it hasn't happened yet.  So, we decided now was the time to make it happen.  We moved in a little late to do much but we decided to build and fill garden boxes so we'd be all ready for spring.  Thanks to some instruction and inspiration from my favorite cooking blog here, we got to work.

It took us a few hours on a Saturday to build the boxes.  Then, we had the soil and compost delivered and spent a good 5 hours filling the boxes another day.  That was some back-breaking work!  We also had to fill in a big dip in our yard with soil so we could put the boxes there in the corner (I don't know if you can see where the fence goes down).  It was fun working together with Joe, though.  I spent a few more hours spread out over a couple days staining the boxes, too, and they were finally done.

We can't wait to plant!

I spent pretty much a whole day finally checking something off my to-do list that I'd had on there for years.  We had a bunch of canvas prints that we'd gotten from Africa on different trips.  I decided to finally build some wood frames so I could mount them and hang them up.  It was kind of exhausting cutting the wood with a hand saw but super fun using a staple gun.  Now I need to come up with some more reasons to use that thing. :)

I finally got around to painting our little book shelf that we got from DI years ago.  It was pretty beat-up.  

Notice the decorations our children added:

I was actually kind of sad to sand out that heart with "E" and "N" in it.  At least the culprit was defacing property with a love of her sister in mind while doing it. :)

I love how it turned out:

Eli enjoying the bookshelf:

Here's a shot of our loft, which is mostly put together:

Finally, it was time to do the same to Elizabeth's dresser.  It is actually my dresser from my room growing up (and my sister's before that) and we gave it to Elizabeth way back on her 7th birthday when she requested her own dresser as a gift.  I told her she could pick out a color and we would paint it.  About a year after that we finally picked out a paint color and about two years later here we are getting it done.

Before:

After:

We had fun sanding it and painting it together (along with some help from Natalie and some neighbor girls).  Joe helped with putting on the new drawer handles.  I really like how it turned out, too.  We still have a little bit of that red paint left.  We'll see if anything else gets a makeover!