Happy Holiday Weekend!

Where have I been? Why eating, of course! :) I hope all of you that come to my blog are enjoying a wonderful holiday weekend with family and friends.

Wednesday was another day of computer lab and Smencil sales. I think that was the last day and I’ll be on to something else.  After school the girls worked on Christmas letters while I prepared some of the food for Thanksgiving Day. Their smiles light up my world.

I started out making wild rice stuffing with intentions of taking photos of everything. That didn’t happen. Funny how our mind brings up good (and bad) memories at the oddest times. When I was making the stuffing it took me back to some darker days. The days when I wasn’t allowed to put celery in the stuffing. In fact, I wasn’t even allowed to have it in the house because he didn’t like the smell. This Thanksgiving I am  thankful to finally live in a place where I’m allowed to be myself. Where I don’t have to tip-toe around waiting for the next explosion. A place where my kids can be kids (no matter how loud or annoying that may be!).

Funny how those thoughts can sneak into the best of days. They never leave us.

 

My beauty wanted to color her hair. I’ve always been one to allow self-expression in my kids. Maybe over Christmas break I’ll scan some photos to show the variety of colors my boys have had over the years. The boys always went with permanent, but with Em we did a 28-day color.

She wanted brown like the rest of her family, but as you can see it wasn’t much of a change. She was pretty bummed so I let her pick out another color when she went shopping with Homer (who by-the-way surprised me with a Nook Color and Elijah with the new video game he wanted….he is so good to us).

Emily helped with dinner while the guys watched something or other on TV.

Cody and Andrew were here for dinner. What a joy to have 7 of our 8 kids here with us. We are so blessed.

After dinner we played the Wii and I have some funny video I’ll share later. (Right now we are working on the prep for the inside stairs and I need to get off the computer).

After the Wii we played poker. Nick left with the most money, and Homer & I were the big winners getting having the kids around the table. Reminds me of the good days. (Note Emily now has red hair. Somehow we never got to brown, but she’s happy. She hates her thin blonde hair ….let’s not talk about Nick’s hair! LOL).

And there they are….the people I love most in the world. Nick, Homer, Cody, Olivia, Andrew, Lucas, Elijah and Emily. The best of Thanksgivings at The White House.