Thanksgiving 2012

We went to Arizona for Thanksgiving.  It was a really fun time!  We decided to try flying down.  It was crazy!!!!!  Some of my family lives in remote areas of Arizona.  My parents are 4 hours from the airport.  This time though, we stayed with my sister Jeanette, she is only a mere 3 hours from the airport.  Haha.  By the time we left our house here and got to my sisters house, it was about a 7 hour trip. Whew!!  Emmy and Tommy both lost it at some point along the way, understandably.  I wanted to lose it too!  So, my whole family, all 42 of us, stayed at my sister's house.  She was such a great hostess.  Good thing she has a very big home.  It's in the woods and she lives on a couple of acres with lots of woods around that!  The kids were in heaven playing in the forest all day.  They also have a trampoline, 2 four wheelers, a basketball court, fun rope swings and lots of great hiking destinations around them.  It really is a little piece of heaven there!!  We had a ton of fun.  We ate a ton of food, played lots of games, watched movies and enjoyed the great outdoors.  The weather was in the 60's and beautiful!  It was good family time because we were all right together in close quarters.  We had a great time and then we were really ready to part ways when the time came.(:  I didn't take enough pictures, I was having too much fun! Here are some pics from November:

 The twins love to come in my bedroom and pull out the trampoline and play on it.  Their faces here don't look anything like them!  Tommy looks especially funny here!  I think Emmy is not loving her hand caught under the edge.  When they first started playing on this Tommy would just walk straight off the edge and wipe out.  Now they are very good at going down backwards.

 Oh that's a happy baby!

 We pulled out the double sled for Erica and Bryant and Emmy and Tommy jumped right on it.  Mike had fun pulling them all around the house on it.  Emmy decided to kick back and enjoy the ride with some milk refreshment.

 OK, so this is the first time Emmy and Tommy really got under my bathroom sink and completely had a hay day!  It was a very good thing because I threw half of that stuff out!  I need to let them get into all of my cupboards and drawers!

 Can you see Tommy holding two q-tips that he sucked on?!?!

 Good night baby!  His hair looks like he just woke up!  He must have been playing peek-a-boo under a blanket with the kids, his favorite game.  Notice the princess wand and crown on his sleeper?  I have way more girl sleepers than boy ones so poor Tommy sometimes goes to bed with a girly sleeper on.  Bryant just hates it.  The instant Tommy wakes up in the morning, Bryant peels his girly sleeper off.(:

 One December Saturday afternoon Erica asked me if I would help her make Christmas cookies and cards to take to lonely people.  It was all her doing and idea, so sweet!  We made cookies together and she wrote all the cute cards and she delivered them to 2 widows and 2 widowers in our neighborhood.  One of the widows came up to me at church on Sunday and said she re-reads Erica's card all the time.  Isn't Tommy cute with his messy face in the middle of it all?  Notice he is holding a candy cane cookie in his left hand.  He loved "helping" out.

 Look at these two cuties.  I had to get a picture of this. 

This was the best, look at Bryant laughing at his book!  It makes me laugh!!!  I am so grateful that my kids know how to read and that they are good at it and love it!  It is such a huge, exciting milestone in their lives.