Happy Thanksgiving

It seems that Thanksgiving is so often overlooked. I mean honestly, the day after Halloween the stores are decked out in Christmas colors and demanding you fill the stockings. But I love Thanksgiving! There's no wrapping presents and no spending monehy but there's lots of family and even more food! We had a great time. We went to John's Incredible Pizza the night before so Nana didn't have to cook:

And laser tag the day after. The oldest three have found a new favorite thing to do! Seriously, the all asked if they could go to laser tag for every birthday for the rest of their lives. So guess I'm off the hook for parties! We even went to the old place that Coop and I last went to for my 16th birthday! Ha. Can't believe it's still there. Total blast from the past, and yes, one random kid that got stuck on our team whispered to his friend, "great, we're on a team with a bunch of old people," but these old people got 1st and 2nd place twice!

And we went all out on the turkeys! G made a fruit turkey:

 Dude made a veggie turkey:

 And the girls made chocolate turkey place settings:

The only problem was, turns out they were all too cute for people to eat. They hardly touched them, or the turkey cheeseball! Ha. But it was fun and there was plenty more to eat, believe you me.

Introducing... Terrier Porter!

I know it seems like we maybe lost our minds (again), but really, this was a very reasonable thing for us to do. See, the kids have been BEGGING us for years to get a dog. We've been putting it off for years. Good, legit excuses like, not until we have our own house, or not until we build a fence, or not until everybody is out of diapers. While they waited for all our excuses to run out, we discussed the fact that if we were to ever give in, we'd need to do it on a dog that worked for us. We decided it couldn't be a puppy, meaning it needed to already be house trained. That it should be medium-sized and good with kids. Well, to turn this (already) long story, that dog materialized and was being offered to us by a family we know that needed to find a home for their dog for totally reasonable reasons. The kids were over the moon and covered the walls of our house with signs like these:

 

And so Porter joined our crew! And suddenly found himself the center of SO MUCH ATTENTION. And yes, L is petting J and Dude is petting L. Sometimes they get confused.

 He joins them for school

 and keeps on eye on things

 until he gets sleepy.

M was alarmed to discover on the first day that he runs faster than she does. 

Ha. She's kind of proud of her speed, and rightly so. But he's faster. The kids are absolutely in love, and from the way he acts whenever we come home, I'm quite certain the feeling is mutual. My favorite thing? When he's outside and wants to come in he stands up on his two back feet and jumps straight up and down. I could watch that endlessly. Oh, and watching L try to play tug-of-war with him is absolutely hilarious.

So now we have a dog. An extremely well-trained dog but a dog nonetheless. Heaven help us.

This is Halloween, This is Halloween!

G outgrew her skeleton shirt this year and passed it down. There may or may not have been tears. And L may or may not have been protesting her sister photo bombing her picture here (And I may or may not be hiding in my room eating all their candy!).

This was the first year we allowed the bigs to carve their own pumpkins. They've always drawn the design and we, or I, have then spent hours cutting out 7 pumpkins. Fortunately they chose nice small pumpkins for their first try. 

 And it was a success! I will never carve 7 pumpkins in one night again! J just kept saying how pleased she was with herself and M obviously felt pretty good about her efforts too!

And you can never forget G. 

 So with that idea of doing less, or attempting to for the first time in my life, I BEGGED and BEGGED and PLEADED and BEGGED the kids to not need to have family themed costumes this year so that we could maybe just re-use some of the previous ones or even just dig into the dress-up box and not spend a dime, but they would not be moved. They even got together and agreed on a theme when I, seeing my last hope, declared that there would be no family theme if everybody wasn't on board. So MarioKart characters it was. However, I swore off making the karts. If they wanted karts, that was all up to them. There were quite a few hours spent cutting, taping, and painting cardboard in the garage. 

 

I was able to pick up a pink dress for Princess Peach along with a red and green shirt for the girls at Goodwill, some plain caps at Michaels and a yellow t-shirt at Walmart. Then I pulled out an old dragon costume that Dude wore as a baby and transformed it into Yoshi by covering the wings with a shell and cutting off claws and fangs. I did, however, have to sew the jumpers for our cross-dressing oldest girls but they made their mustaches and decorated their hats), sew yellow jammie pants for Dude and create an entire spiked shell and horned hood for Bowser. I did my best to keep it simple! When looking for Bowser ideas on Pinterest, one amazing lady admitted to having spent like 42 hours on her son's costume! I can guarantee you, I did not. I was worried that my stickler for details would be disappointed, but he LOVED it!

In fact, they were all pretty thrilled with the results. Sure, the Princess's crown didn't stay on and turns out that cardboard karts REALLY slow down your trick-or-treating but they were pretty darn cute, even if somebody did mistake L for Godzilla. Ha! And I'm proud of the older girls's hard work. That's not to say that I won't be begging again next year...