Thanksgiving

We had a great Thanksgiving dinner at my sister's-in-law house with her growing family.  We were joined by a missionary couple with young children and my mother-in-law and her significant other.  I made honey roasted sweet potatoes and a squash and couscous mix I adapted from a recipe I found in an old Everyday magazine.

Thanksgiving has got to be the only time I had tv because I really miss watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.  I have tried every year for the past three years to stream it unsuccessfully and this year was no exception.  I accidentally downloaded something that made ads come up all over the place in my computer.  I spent the whole first hour of Thanksgiving fixing my computer.  I finally settled for a Youtube video of the parade from 2013 which I think my kids really liked.  Hermione counted all the marching bands- there were eleven.  Ariana just said that a lot of the girls were pretty and very good dancers.  Lucy liked that Dora was in the parade.  So at least that was more successful than last year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 Grandma Cheri and baby Iris

 Mack and is that my husband or two turkeys?  Just kidding!

 Kids are getting hungry!

 These two take the cutest father daughter pictures!

Our beautiful hostess stirring up the gravy!

 Kids Table

 Me and the kids playing Zombie Fluxx

 Ruby and Ariana writing in the Thankful book

Long Time No See

Just a quick update.  I have started watching a boy at our home before and after school.  He is in Ariana's afternoon Kindergarten class and goes to our church.  It is nice to have a little extra money, but it has not been easy.  I have had to come up with a system so they wouldn't sit around and watch TV all day or try to play with each other and it ends up with a ton of fighting.  So I created a morning and afternoon bucket in which I write down thing that need to get done.  Technically these are things that should get done every day but we rarely get 2 or 3 or these things done a day, but I try not to get too worked up about it.  The beauty of the bucket is that I do not get blamed for choosing the activity- the bucket gets blamed.  Plus they get excited about doing the fun things in the bucket too.

Here is a sample of the activities:

Morning-

• Dishes/Kitchen Clean up
• Laundry
• Crafts
• Reading
• Baking/Cooking
• SPECIAL Chore

Afternoon-

• 15 Minute Pick Up in Living Room
• Clean Bedrooms
• Homework
• Reading
• AWANA/Good News Club 
• Take out Trash
• Exercise/Outside Games
• Journaling
• SPECIAL Chore

It isn't perfect but it does give me the feeling of being productive at times plus it MAKES everyone work together.  You leave them alone or unsupervised and they make a complete mess.  Sometimes I can't always watch the 2-year old, but like I said it isn't perfect.

Also I have a cold coming on so I really didn't want to do any chores today, but we got clean bedrooms (2 times), journaling, trash, and SPECIAL chore (which ended up being mopping).  So we got SOMETHING done even if it wasn't much.