33 weeks!

Wow- we just hit 33 weeks of pregnancy!  I'm sure that the next several weeks will fly by with all the holiday happenings.  Here is 19-month-old Samuel perched on the baby bump, as is his preference...

One Little Indian

Emma got to dress up as an Indian for school today.  All the kids dressed up as Pilgrims or Indians last week for their Thanksgiving party.  Emma had the stomach flu the night before so she wasn't able to go, but her teacher kindly let her dress up today.

 

 This was her Halloween costume when she was two-years-old:

 

WOW-- How much she's grown and changed in 2 years!!!

Count your Blessings

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  

Some of our many BLESSINGS:

Rachel & LuAnne

  Tom & Stephanie

 

Samuel (19 months!) and a favorite doll

  Grandma & Jenna

 Jeanne & Emma

 Wes, Nathan &  Cole

This was too cute not to post...  Two older cousins playing dress up with a thrilled little girl!

 We even got a sprinkling of snow!

Thankful

Nathan, Emma and I made our own Thanksgiving decorations.  We made fall leaves and wrote on them some of the things we are thankful for...  Some of our many blessings:

Definition of THANKFUL

1: conscious of benefit received

2: expressive of thanks

3: well pleased 

Synonyms: delighted, gratified, happy, joyful, pleased, satisfied, glad 

---

There was a photo of Nathan's 4th/5th grade class in a newspaper local to Nathan's school this week.  I won't post the photo because it didn't scan well, but I will post Nathan's part of the article... 

I am thankful...

Artwork

Nathan brought this home from school today... something he made in art class.  We thought it was pretty good!

Brace Face

Nathan got braces a few days ago.  He is doing well and we think he looks great in them!

Lego Land

Samuel has recently developed a love for Lego's.  We have Dora and Bob the Builder sets.  He likes them equally and spends quite a bit of time nearly every day playing with them.  This is something he and Emma often do together, but last night Daddy had a chance to sit down and build too so it was extra special!

Samuel plays with play-dough

This week Samuel got to play play-dough for the first time!  He really seemed to enjoy it!

 Of course he had to try to eat some:

School pictures

We got the kids' school pictures back recently.  We already had a little warning that Emma wasn't too thrilled with the male photographer, so as you will see, she didn't look like her usual happy self... But they weren't bad for 1st Official School pictures!

 Emma's whole Pre-K class:

 Nathan's 4th grade picture:

Samuel's 18 month photos +

 We have waited to post these until we sent them out to family and friends...

While we were at it I also took pictures of Nathan, Emma, and our whole family:

Twinkies

For Emma's first birthday she received an adorable outfit I had seen in a magazine, and a doll with matching clothes.  She LOVED it so much that she was quite sad when the outfit became too small.  So... for another occasion we got her a bigger size of the same outfit.  Just recently we realized that the old outfit would fit Samuel so we took the opportunity to get a picture of the two of them (+ "Dolly") all matching.

 Emma, December 2007

An old friend; a new look

As you may recall a post a couple of months ago about Emma falling in love with an old doll of mine, Karen Christmas, who was my favorite through most of my baby doll years.  She has been through a lot and it was clear within the first few days of Emma loving on her that her poor beat up body wasn't going to last much longer.  Her arms and legs were ready to fall off (we had to tape them with duct tape), and the fabric of her body was wearing awfully thin.  We decided to send her off to a doll doctor.

BEFORE

We finally got her back the other day.  Boy does she look better- a new body, new clothes, new hair style, missing eye lashes replaced and cleaned up quite a bit:

AFTER

 She even came with a note:

Caught!

The squirrel who likes to eat our pumpkins

The damage