Our Thanksgiving week trip!

So, we made the trip to Georgia....we left at 5am last Saturday morning and didn't get there until 7:30ish. What was supposed to be an 8 and 1/2 hour trip ended up taking about 14 hours not only b/c of stopping to eat and use the bathroom, but we ended up having to get new rear tires on the van. It was a way long trip and so good to get there! We visited Perimeter church on Sunday morning and spent time with the Ballard's afterwards (here's Kylie with Mary Alex and the twins). It was good to catch up with seminary friends that we hadn't seen since.

We arrived in Ellijay at the mountain cabin of friends of ours (the Lassiter's) on Sunday night and spent 2 1/2 wonderful days of sleeping, talking, playing, eating...with no real schedule and no where to be. Tom and I realized that this was our first ever trip as a family where we weren't traveling home for a holiday or to see grandparents.





Here we are with the Hathaway's (more friend's from seminary) with all eight of our kids. The kids got along great and we really enjoyed being able to spend time with these good friends of ours. The weather was awesome and we spent the majority of time outside playing ball, throwing frisbee, swinging on the tree swing....actually, a lot of the time was spent either getting ready for a meal or cleaning up after a meal... :) It was a great time....thanks, Shannon and Joel, for spending it with us!!! Oh, the excitement of the week was AJ getting hit in the head with the tree swing....she ended up getting two stitches (it wasn't too bad).
The last leg of our trip was in Crossville, TN where more seminary friend's of ours live. We had Thanksgiving dinner with the Quillen's....four adults and ten kids....we were greatly outnumbered, but we had a great time! It took almost 14 hours to get home (although on the way back we drove mostly at night, arriving home at 3am). We were exhausted by the time we got back...the house is a wreck and we're still recovering from the travels, but it was such a blessing to spend time with friends that we hadn't seen (as a family) since seminary. It was nice to catch up on what the Lord is doing in their lives as well as sharing what has been going on in our lives...and beyond that to just spend time with them. Taking care of so many kids in the midst of trying to visit was hard, but the time was still refreshing to my relational heart. Whew, I'm just glad the driving is over, although it makes me not look forward to the drive to Virginia next month.

Matthias crawling

It's been a while since I've posted, but for some reason I haven't been able to post pictures... and that is more than half the fun of posting! Anyways, here's a recent clip of Matthias on his second or third day of crawling. He really looks like a little elephant....one hand, than another....and then he pushes off with both knees. Sooo cute. It's a little crazy to have these two little babies all over the house. It also figures that the week that Matthias learns to crawl, Leighton is beginning to pull herself up on furniture. I think (since she was born a minute after her brother) that she is trying to prove herself by being a step ahead of him in anything she can. :) Other than babies underfoot all day, there's not too much going on. We have passed a cold through our whole family but Josiah. We're heading to the mountains of Georgia on Saturday for some fun vacation with seminary friends. Hopefully I'll have pictures of that up in a couple weeks.

Lemons and Trick-or-treating!

So, I had a little bit of time on friday...and had great plans of dusting the floor while the three little kids were napping b/c the two littlest ones kept on trying to eat the hair/dust balls that kept getting stuck to their toes. Anyways, a friend of mine has a friend with a lemon tree...so she brought me a big bag of lemons, so instead of doing something productive I ended up taking artsy pictures of lemons. :) Oh, and I made fresh lemonade which actually tasted really good!
Here they are...AJ the pirate, Josiah the spy, Matthias the pumpkin, Leighton the deckhand, and Kylie the chinadoll. Okay, so we had quite the cultural experience this weekend... it seems that they have a tradition here to move trick-or-treating to the saturday before halloween if halloween falls on a weekday/school-night. I had talked to a neighbor a while back about halloween and she had forewarned me that our neighborhood usually gets hit pretty hard. We ended up getting four bags of candy (those really big bags with a good mixture of different things)...there is no real way to explain how trick-or-treating went on saturday night...I think it's definitely something that you need to experience to understand. Anyways, we got the kids all ready and after we took the picture of them outside we realized that a few of our neighbors were setting up lawn chairs at the end of their driveways with their candy buckets....thinking that that was a good idea, we set up at the end of our carport. Tom took the kids around first (all five) and I sat with a book and the candy and waited. I got a good number of kids, nothing overwhelming. Trucks and cars were driving by with kids hopping out at the houses. After Tom came back, I ended up taking the kids out. They had learned that people don't knock on doors in the neighborhood. If you are going to hand out candy you sit in your driveway...otherwise the kids will skip your house (no knocking/ringing doorbells???). By the time I had gotten back to our house there was a line of kids from where Tom was sitting (almost under our carport) all the way down past our mailbox. There were seriously at least thirty kids in that line. It was insane. We had gone through our 15 to 20 pounds of candy in about an hour and a half or so. What we found out from a neighbor later is that we are one of a handful of neighborhoods in the whole county (there are a lot of houses in 'the country'), so people literally come from everywhere to the few neighborhoods in town. There's a church in town that does a fall festival every year...I think we'll be going there next year. :)

My boys

Here are my boys. Josiah has a neat friendship with the twins...he definitely entertains them with his crazy dancing and peek-a-booing. Matthias is still my happy go lucky baby...he's got a crazy wild tuft of hair for his bangs (I don't know where the curly wave came from, but it's adorable)... I think he's getting to the point where he's realizing that Leighton has it better off than he does by being able to get around. He's rocking on his hands and knees, but can't move forward quite yet. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when they're both moving...and I know it'll be here before I know it. What fun! :)

Leighton and her growl

In the past couple of weeks Leighton has really started to consistently growl when she is happy. She'll wake up in the morning growling...she'll crawl around growling (yes, she is crawling)... she'll growl in between bites of baby food. She has always had a deep cute throaty voice ever since she was born, but this growling thing is so adorable. Just today and yesterday she has realized the freedom that she has gained in being able to crawl. I found her in the bathroom this morning... and she spent a good part of the afternoon under the kitchen table, crawling around picking up cheerios that she had dropped after lunch (and growling).

Homecoming Parade!

On Friday the kids got out of school early for the homecoming day parade downtown... 2:30 in the afternoon. It started with all the emergency vehicles of the town driving down Main St. with their sirens blaring and then went to marching bands, class floats, football teams, and cheerleading squads. Everyone was throwing out candy to the kids watching. (Leighton and Matthias missed most of it b/c of naptime) It was definitely a fun small town experience. :)

Seeing the Baggett's in Orlando....

We went up to Orlando yesterday and met up with Dave and Chip Baggett who are vacationing in Orlando with Chip's parents. It was a sweet and chaotic time for dinner and playing at the pool with their family. It's been a nice treat to see several friends here and there who have been in Florida for one reason or another. It has definitely helped the homesickness to see friends. The Baggett's are in fundraising mode to plant a multi-cultural church in Philadelphia....we're excited to see how God is going to use their family....please pray for them when you think of them!