Thanksgiving

  Our Thanksgiving was rather quiet this year. We dearly missed getting together with the Martins. Since it was just us this year we decided to go with a breast instead of a full bird. Although it always seems silly to buy a turkey when so many call our backyard home, but I wouldn't want to harm them, poor things. I forgot to take any pictures, but I remembered to get a few of dessert.

We finally were able to break out our cider press and dig into all the apples we had been storing.

We ended up with 12 gallons! Our biggest yield yet!

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   We decided to brave the shopping hoard and get Christmas shopping done in Yakama. We picked up lunch and took it to this park to eat. It was chilly but the kids had fun.

  We always seem to try new things on the missionaries, this time we smoked the rest of the salmon that Daniel had caught. 

Charles Turns 12

    Charles chose to have a turkey-themed birthday party. It was the first friend party we had had in several years. He helped me design the invites and came up with all the activities. He had invited 8 or so friends, but only one showed up. We made the best of it though. Of course, we had a pinata.

We made crowns. 

The turkey feathers were gathered from our yard. 

We played pin the feather on the turkey.

   He chose to have brownies with ice cream for his treat, and we had tons of pizza because I had ordered 4 from Costco. I later took some to the youth when we were driving to a stake activity. They were very grateful. Our guest kept commenting on how differently we do things from their experience. It was interesting. I think Charles had a good time though.

November Just Keeps Coming

 Henry has loved building things with the magnatiles at school. He frequently holds on to them to show me his creations.

Teddy has become entirely too independant! He gets into everything! 

   I had seperated some meat and wrapped it up, but apparently not too well. As our dinner was thawing we got an impressive blood stalagmite build up. Maybe glance away if you are squeamish. 

 

The deer have been eating our pumpkins with great relish.

Teddy was here.

Leaf angels!

Lizzy and Teddy were rocking out while she was doing the dishes.

We got crafty for Veteran's Day.

   Daniel and I actually went on a date! We had dinner at the Legion Hall for Veteran's Day. It was fun being around so many veterans again.  I got dressed up for the anniversary of my Friend Torii's birthday. We had a virtual celebration.

Lizzy had a team bonfire night with her wrestling crew.

  I drove the youth to Stevensen for a stake game night. It was fun, but the road was closed due to an accident so we had to take the bridge of the Gods, which sounds miuch more impressive than it really is. The activity was fun and I met so many nice people. 

   We had the library appreciation night for the Friends of the Goldendale Library. I was appointed as the secretary at our meeting. We discussed how we were unable to go to the appreciation day in Vancouver, ( we are part of the Vancouver Library System) and one of our number was lamenting that we had no gift for the party the next day. So I made gifts for all our vollenteers. I was babysiting a classmate of Henry's and she was so helpful with my craft. I made little books that said "You are number one in our book!" and put them in plastic ornaments. I also had gold star ornaments on the gifts since we had joked in our meeting that everyone deserved a gold star.  Here are some of our ladies doing a gingerbread craft.

Henry decided he needed more eyes.

Teddy got a huge goose egg on his forehead from rough housing with the kids.

   As I said, November just keeps coming! I joined aparenting class as part of Henry's preschool offerings, so I was gone every Wednesday night for an hour. It was interesting, but hardly new information. I did appreciate knowing how they addressed issues in the classrooms. It did make my wed nights super busy. So for 2 weeks I was gone every other night with meetings. It got a little stressful.