I hope you had a great Thanksgiving holiday. I love having the whole week off to head to my parents beach house. We couldn’t have had better weather. It was warm and sunny. We heated up their pool and went swimming and swam in the tidal pools at the beach.

We enjoyed reconnecting with cousins and having lots of laughs. Even finished a 1,000 piece puzzle.

My youngest sister and I were able to see a small Darius Rucker concert. It was so fun since it was a small event with open bar. The sky was a clear blue and it was so fun to experience it with my sister.

My Mom does an incredible turkey dinner. This is a small peak at her new kitchen, it is gorgeous. Maybe one day we can do a tour of the renovations to the entire house.

Let’s talk about this upcoming week. It is Christmas Season!! Woohoo! I could tell by the line at the post office that the crowds have begun to come out for shopping and errands. I have lots to do to get ready, I am sure you do to.

Last weeks goals:

Family

1. Go eat lunch with my boys at school
2. Set up a date night. We haven’t been out just the two of us in a couple months and we need it. – FAIL

House/Home

1. Order Britton’s Birthday Cake
2. Order Christmas Cards

Blog

1. Link up with 6 Blog Hops. I would like to get some readers, it will be more fun to write if I know that someone is reading. Hi there, if anyone is reading this. 🙂
2. Write a Thanksgiving post that links to my 5 favorite posts to have up during the week of Thanksgiving. I will take the week of Thanksgiving off.

This weeks goals:

Family

1. Borrow some new books at the library for the boys. They are about done with the current stack.

House/Home

1. Get everything ready for Britton’s birthday party on Sunday.
2. Address and mail Christmas cards – I received them and now need to get them in the mail.

Blog

1. Link up with 6 Blog Hops. I was able to do this last week and had some views so I’ll keep this going.
2. Write a post that I can put up for when my Grandmother passes because I will be traveling and away from wireless. She is on hospice care and will pass any day now. She is the most faithful woman so I am sure she will go straight to be with Him. My family is crushed and will miss her terribly.

I hope everyone enjoys the rush this week brings to the season. We put up our 12 foot tree last night and it is way bigger than we expected but looks great. I can’t wait to put the decorations on it.

I hope you are enjoying your holiday. We are spending time with family so I am going to take the rest of the week off from the blog. If you are visiting for the first time feel free to take a look at my favorite posts so far.

1. Bow Bootcamp – How I got my daughter to wear her bows.
2. How to stop your wreath from scratching your front door.
3. Toy Review – What my 7 year old boys received and actually played with this past year.

Here is a preview of our new family photos. I am so happy with how they turned out.

This weekend was so great for my boys. We took a day trip to go visit our yellow lab, Dixie, who is at hunting school. She has been there almost 6 weeks now and we were really missing her and wanted to make sure she knew that we are still her family. While my husband doesn’t hunt very much, my father does and wanted to her to become trained to go with him when bird hunting. I was all for it so that she would become a well trained dog. I think she has a few more weeks before she will come home and rejoin our family. We are all missing her terribly, I think my husband wanted to dog-nap her to bring her home with us.

It was a beautiful area where the training school is located. We played with Dixie at the kennel and then took her on a long walk through the fields and the horses would all come up to the fences to have us pet them. It was so fun. But we were surprised at how emotional our boys were when it was time to leave. They both were very upset which was good to see because my boys are not the most emotional kids. I like when they open their hearts.

This week will be full of prep for the Thanksgiving Holiday. We go visit my parents at their beach house for the week. I can’t wait to see lots of aunts and cousins.

This weeks goals:

Family

1. Go eat lunch with my boys at school
2. Set up a date night. We haven’t been out just the two of us in a couple months and we need it.

House/Home

1. Order Britton’s Birthday Cake
2. Order Christmas Cards

Blog

1. Link up with 6 Blog Hops. I would like to get some readers, it will be more fun to write if I know that someone is reading. Hi there, if anyone is reading this. 🙂
2. Write a Thanksgiving post that links to my 5 favorite posts to have up during the week of Thanksgiving. I will take the week of Thanksgiving off.

I hope everyone has a great week!

I feel like we are in picture overload here in our house. We had professional portraits taken a week ago that turned out so great, I can’t wait to upload some pictures here. Then the very next day my boys had their school pictures so I decided not to order them since I was going to have the family ones. My boys are well known for not smiling at all so I thought they would be terrible. Well, they sent home the proofs to give us a final chance to order them and they are fantastic.

Here are pictures of the pictures so poor quality.

So now I have spent the money on the professional pictures and now an extra amount on the school pictures. Britton had hers this week as well but I haven’t seen the results of those so that could cost me a pretty penny as well.

Why do they charge so much for school pictures now? Well, of course, they want to make money, but with having 3 kids it is just crazy when the smallest package starts at $35. We went from not having any professional pictures for at least a year, to having a boatload of pictures all at once. I guess I won’t be to sad one day to have lots of pictures of the kids but I will be sad to look at our bank account at the end of the month. Ha!

Like I have said before, I am an over-scheduler when it comes to kids activities. I like them to keep active and learn as many skills as possible. Maybe this is because I dedicated myself to one sport very young and while I was very successful I wonder if I could have done other sports (especially team sports) too.

This past weekend my daughter who is 3 had a soccer game  and my boys had one soccer game. Next weekend my daughter has 1 game and my boys have….3 games!! That is maybe a little more than they can physically handle.

A few weeks ago they did a soccer tournament and had 4 games in 2 days and by the last game they looked like they couldn’t move. They were basically just kicking the ball out of bounds just so they could stop running. We will see how it goes this time.

Since this is our first season of playing more than just once a week I need to make sure I have the right sideline gear and some of the fields are far from the parking lot so I am considering purchasing a collapsible wagon to keep in our trunk to carry all our chairs, blanket, toys for Britton etc. Has anyone bought one of these and have a certain brand they like? Man…I just clicked over to Amazon to start looking at the wagons and I didn’t realize how expensive they were! Some are $150! I think this one is more in our price range. 🙂

I hope everyone had a great Halloween! It was definitely our best yet. Our neighborhood had a pre-trick or treat party and then everyone started together and the boys had a blast running from house to house with all their friends. Britton had fun and was ready to go home after about 45 mins which was plenty long enough for me too. We then had a bunch of neighbors hang out in our driveway and my neighbor brought a ton of food over, it was lots of fun.