A time to give thanks

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Things here have been a whirlwind the past week or so. All of us have been sick with a cold and it seems I am the only one who is hanging on to it still! We did manage to have a nice Thanksgiving though, despite the nose blowing and coughing. My parents came down from PA on Wednesday and spent a few days with us. The boys love having their Nana & Granddaddy around! Thanksgiving day, Chris' parents, sister, brother and future sister-in-law came over and we had a really nice time. I will say that I felt like I was in the kitchen cooking most of the day, which didn't really make me feel too thankful. I think next year we will down scale a little. We have so many leftovers!

Yesterday, the boys enjoyed having a whole day with their Nana and Granddaddy. We went to their favorite playground and played and then out to lunch. Unfortunately, we had a huge weather change yesterday and it went from being 75 degrees outside on Thanksgiving day to a high of 50 degrees yesterday! It was also quite windy yesterday so the playground visit was only about 25 minutes.






Now that Thanksgiving is over, I feel rushed to get things done for Christmas. We will be decorating our tree either this afternoon or tomorrow and also putting up other decorations. Christmas does not seem very far off to me and I have this sense of being rushed! Whatever happened to that feeling of things going by slowly when we were little?

The holidays also bring on some stress for both Chris & I. Chris is extremely busy at work right now, he is actually there right now. When you work for a retail company Black Friday is a big day, so he has been working extremely hard all week. We are looking forward to the end of the holidays because it means his work will slow down some and I will be on my own with the boys less.

Plays well with others

On November 13th I had a parent/teacher conference with Hayes' preschool teacher. For the most part he got a glowing report. He knows all his shapes, colors, letters and numbers. He is one of the only kids in the class who can write their name. And the teacher said he is pretty quiet in class and plays well with the other kids! I was a little surprised by this, because he is not quiet at home and he also does not play well with Bryce. I'm sure thats a different situation though, especially considering Bryce is his little brother.

We do need to work on some of his self help skills. He can not or will not wash his hands on his own for some reason and potty training, well it basically doesn't exist. I have tried so many things to spark his interest in that and he is slowly becoming more interested. Hopefully one day soon he will decide he is ready.

The last thing she told me was that he refuses to answer a direct question. She will ask him what his first and last name are and he refuses to answer her! Now, she and I both know he knows his first and last names, but as usual my little boy is stubborn! Everything must be his idea! Oh well, hopefully he will grow out of that soon. :)

I leave you with a picture (above) taken last week at the Children's Museum of Richmonds new Dinosaur exhibit.

Happy Halloween!

Hayes and Bryce went trick or treating for the very first time last night for Halloween. We live on a cul-de-sac, so we only went to about 5 houses. Hayes loved it and was most excited by the play spider he got at one house. It was very cool seeing all of our neighbors out and about and in costumes. We tried to get a picture of the boys together, but this is the best we got. It's nearly impossible to get a good picture of the 2 of them, since neither of them ever stays still! :) The 2nd picture was trying to get the boys ready to go out.