Thanksgiving

We tried something new this year at our Thanksgiving Party...I'm not sure we will do it again because it made for a very hectic day but here it is...
We've been trying to teach our kids to be grateful for what they have and trying to help them be aware of people less fortunate than us by looking for opportunities to serve others. This has been a yearly focus for us, which is a lot easier now that Bronwynn is a bit older. Some of the little things we've done have been to stop our car and ask if people need assistance, usually this means pushing cars (Don't tell my chiropractor!), helping people bring stuff in from freakish wind storms, and offering assistance to mom's with strollers, and of course our Thankful tree. In general just trying to be aware and preceive the needs of others. With Thanksgiving approaching we wanted to do something a bit larger and focus on people without homes since we try really hard to be grateful for our one bedroom apartment.
We found a homeless shelter downtown that was in need of hygiene kits and scarves and decided to focus on them this year. We obtained the necessary items for our project through the Bishop's storehouse and were able to get enough stuff to do 40 hygiene kits and 73 scarves! Hooray! We set it up so the kids could put together the hygiene kit and once that was done we had the older kids move on to scarves. It was a lot of fun and even our youngest (2 years old) had a blast helping out.
The only problem we ran into was that with all of us working on the service project there was no one to help in the kitchen. Ooops! That left my mom a little frantic and frazzled by the time dinner came around.

Perhaps next year we will have it more prepped and ready before the party begins.

Thankful Tree

Here is our finished Tree! Don't you just love B's scallywag face!

Thankful Tree

Josh and I were trying to find a way to help our kids be a little more grateful for all of the blessings we have when we came up with this thankful tree. We've seen many versions of this but decided to make it large so we could put leaves up all month! Now at dinner each of us gets 3 leaves that we can name things we are grateful for...no repeats! It has been fun to see what our kids Elijah (6) and Bronwynn (2) have come up with so far. We have the bionicles and toys of course but we are also getting things like countries and clean water. Our goal is to fill the tree by Thanksgiving so I'll repost another picture before we take it down. I think this just might make it into our family traditions pile!

Katie's Baptism

My sweet niece Katelyn Sea Schmidt was baptised tonight! She looked beautiful in her white dress that was made by my mom! Andrea's sister Kristen gave a talk on the importance of Baptism and I got to give a talk on the Holy Ghost. Aunt Anna made yummy treats and Andrea's other sister and sister in law gave the prayers. What a wonderful evening and a perfect way to end a Sunday. I'm so grateful to have family close and to be a part of their lives! What a blessing!

Halloween Night

We love halloween at our house and I have to remind myself to be patient and wait for halloween to get here. Otherwise I start to get ready for halloween in July! Josh started the kids day with pumpkin pancakes and chocolate chips to make the jack-o-lantern faces! Cute daddy! Then he brought them to Macey's to see Mommy at work and to do some trick or treating at the store. We went home to jack-o-lantern pizza, trick or treating in the neighborhood and watching the halloween classics like Garfield and Charlie Brown! I started work at 6am that morning so Bonnie and I were out for the count by 9:30! Oh, I almost forgot...Elijah is a Bionicle (thank you Ebay), and Bonnie is a witch!