Our first two Christmas Miracles this year.

Christmas costs money!

Seriously - it kind of stinks! And I forget sometimes that a $12 family advent devotional that I really, really want to do is $12 we actually need and can't use to download a book and ornament templates and that Christmas trees are expensive - especially the good noble firs. But the Lord showed up and blessed us so so much!

First, Wednesday afternoon I'm just trolling Facebook and found this! Yep, it's a family advent devotional with ornament templates to print out that is written by the author of A Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp and it's totally FREE!!! (yes, I cried!)

And then a few hours later we got a call from our church saying that they had a donation of Christmas trees and wanted to know if we would like one! (for a split second did I think, "I hope it's a noble fir" but that thought left quickly ... Don't judge, I apparently have tree issues I need to work thru! Ha ha ha!)

So after dinner last night we headed up to the church to pick up our tree and it was 7 feet tall!

But seeing as we have an 11 month old who is walking and climbing on top of things we had to modify it a bit.

Anyways, we got it inside and turned Elf on and had a great evening!

In true baby form, John-Paul was all about the boxes! 

Oh and I can't not mention this part of the evening ... Bennett dressed up like Santa, and wanted to put snow flakes on the tree and build a Lego city just like Elf does in the movie! ha ha! Lucky for us I already had snowflake ornaments! :) 

So all that to say ... isn't God good?!
He always surprises me with his kindness!

Oh and then Bennett just broke out into song ... it was too sweet!

Thanksgiving 2012

As is our tradition, we went out the night before Thanksgiving (not to Yard House as in years before) and had a lovely family dinner which consisted of zero fried food (some traditions have to die).

John-Paul really enjoyed the flat bread that came with his daddy's salad and wanted to go sit at his own table with his treasure!

Thanksgiving morning we packed up all our food and knives and assorted kitchen paraphernalia and headed over to my mom's house to spend the day with Adam's mom and my brother Casey (everyone else was out of town).
We snapped a couple pictures while we were all still clean ...

... and then went inside to eat breakfast and facetime with the Arkansas portion of the fam.

Then the "real cooking" began. But here's the deal ... our family (me and Adam mostly) have switched to eating Paleo and we really love it, seriously, we do, I think we will eat like this forever, we like it so much.  However, Thanksgiving is not traditionally a very paleo friendly holiday so we had to get creative... and by creative I mean look up recipes online.  

Here's what we decided on:

Bacon and Chive sweet potato biscuits, Sweet Potato Gratin, Warm Brussels Sprout Salad, Cauliflower Mashed "potatoes" , Bread-Less Stuffing, Turkey, Tri-tip and pumpkin pie bars for dessert! 

So needless to say, there was some work to be done so Casey and Adam set to working while I tried to help but John-Paul was not enjoying life much so I mostly just did crowd control! 

But once this happened...

 Then this could happen...

 Then I was actually able to help but all I really did was dishes and make the mash but I was just happy to wear my cute apron I got in Solvang on our honeymoon!

 So our meal was awesome and I enjoyed every bit of it!

John-Paul really enjoyed his too, but Bennett asked if he could go read some books and take a nap ... it was about 2:30 when we sat down and he was done for... poor kid had half a left over cheese burger from the night before later that night.

But despite our dismantling of the "traditional" Thanksgiving spread we were able to keep one tradition fully in tact ... the watching Elf while we wait for room to eat dessert!

Mornings at the Park

Since its Thanksgiving break and we don't have a whole lot going on we let Bennett pick what we did this morning and he wanted to go to the park by his school.

So we went. And it was great! Yay for the first day of break!!

Veteran's Day 2012

I have not excuse for my absence - I haven't had time/desire to blog and thus I have not.
But I got the urge to blog again and so here I am.
We'll see if I can keep this up.

I'm not going to try and play catch up  - so I'm just going to start with what made me feel like blogging - our annual trip to the Murrieta Veteran's Day Parade!

This was our fourth year attending (see the first, second and third years) and it's always a great day of down home fun! We started out at Richie's for a late breakfast with Grandma!

After a rather interesting parking lot adventure in the mini van we finally made our way down to Washington and found a great place to park our bums.

Except after a bit we realized it was sans shade and we were all a whole lot warmer (err... sweaty) than we had planned to be!

The parade was a lot smaller (shorter) this year since they held it on sunday afternoon, but it was still super fun for Bennett especially since there were girls walking the parade handing out pinwheels and flags!

Bennett loved the tanks and said he wanted to buy one so he could shoot people (hmmm....) but John-Paul's whole body shook with fear each time one of the three tanks passed by - poor boy!

Bennett with "Doc Hudson" 

No he wasn't spitting spit wads at parade goers ... but this still cracks me up! 

Grandma had to go sit in the shade for a while - because it just got too too hot - but it was nice to hang out with her for the afternoon before she went home to her "weekend home" (she's very fancy!)

See you next year Veterans Day Parade!