Thanksgiving 2016

Last year we started a fun tradition of "dressing" each other up for Thanksgiving dinner and the kids were super excited about doing it again this year!  We even added to the fun by letting everyone choose a non-traditional eating utensil from a bag.  

Porter ate his dinner with a spatula.

Love the look on his face as he eyes the spatula!😂

Gabe drew tongs and Quentin had an ice cream scoop.

(I'm afraid the underwear on the head will be considered a given at Thanksgiving from here on out.)

John ate with a rice paddle, and me, a pizza cutter.

We are grateful for good times and great memories!

Gabe's 10th Birthday

This baby boy turned 10 years old today.  We have no idea how that happened.  Double digits...10 years!  We adored him then and we adore him now.  We may have forced him to recreate the adoration of our first family photo and he may not have been thrilled about it, but guess what, 10 years old is not old enough to get out of stuff like this.😉  

We had a super fun Nerf Gun War birthday party with Gabe's friends from church.  We rearranged the furniture in the house to make blockades, created team bases, spawning points and created "classified" missions (like capture the flag) the kids had to complete.  Basically, it was loud mass chaos, but oh so much fun! 

Porter is all smiles behind that mask : )

And for his final birthday hurrah, Gabe chose Stake and Shake for his dinner out : )

Happy Birthday Gabe!

November 2016

November held some unexpected blessings for us.😇😇😇

We had not one, but both water heaters in our house crap out on us.  Luckily, both were still covered under manufacturer warranties.  So it didn't cost us anything to replace them other than the time it took John to take them out, deal with the warranty stuff, and install new ones.  Not having to buy two new water heaters = huge blessing. 

A month ago, our car reached the mileage point where it was time to have the transmission fluid changed as part of regular maintenance.  At the time, I thought this is too expensive, we aren't having any transmission problems, we should wait to do this, but I went ahead and did it anyway.  Soon after it started making weird noises and vibrations that could not be ignored.  We took it to our mechanic, he said the transfer case was bad and it would cost $3,000 to fix.  For some reason the transmission fluid change expedited the demise of the transfer case.  Ugh!Ugh!Ugh!

However, a little research and again we found this issue was covered under the warranty we got from Mazda when we bought the car.  We took it to the dealership and they replaced the transfer case for us at no cost.  We had 1,000 miles and 3 months left on the warranty.  So glad I went through with the transmission fluid change.  Had I waited, our warranty probably would have been expired.  Can you say tender mercies?  Another huge blessing!

Oh and a hubby who knows how to take care of all these things = huge blessing! 

They say these things come in threes.  I'm really hoping the water heaters each count as one and with the car we have reached our quota😀 

I hear rust is the latest fashion...

 Homemade orange glazed donuts for family night🍩🍩🍩

 Morning selfies with Quentin😝

Porter discovers an effective way to make a cookie crumb crust for Thanksgiving dinner😂

Funny conversation I overheard between Quentin and his friend Paige the other day.

This may officially be his first Quentin-ism.

Paige: "My dad let me ride shotgun in his car one time."

Quentin: "Oh yeah?  Did you shoot yourself in the eye with it?"

Remember this little piece of artwork Quentin left on my wall this summer?

Yes, I stuck a frame around it.  After all, it is a portrait of me.😍

And finally, Zeke turned one year old.  We may call him Satan, Butthead, Zeke-avirus, Zekeoppotomus, and lots of other not nice names when he's being dumb, but we really do love him.  Okay, I really love him, John pretty much just hates him, but he loves me, so he lets me keep him and I can handle that.🐾🐾🐾

Happy Birthday Zeke!