Happy Thanksgiving!

 This past week Evie started work. She is lifeguarding and enjoying it. Yesterday was slightly busier than the first two days, as kids are off school this week and there was a camp with 27 kids in the pool! I am thankful she is working pretty close to Nathan and will be on the noon-4:15 shift, which means I can drop her off and Nathan can pick her up, so I don't have to drive both ways. In January she will  hopefully be getting her license. The shift works well as she can complete school in the morning and then head into work and still have evenings free.

Speaking of evenings, the kids had a Friendsgiving at youth group this past week and all made their own food to bring! Evie made pumpkin pie, Damen made chocolate pie, Kaleb made homemade rolls and Hannah made whipped cream! I was super excited that they all put in the effort to make something and everything turned out really well. 

Friday night we had our first of what will be a weekly community group with church. It was a soft start with only three families, but there is lots of interest within the church. One of the people is an older woman who I asked what she would like my children to call her when I was introducing them to her and she said "Queen Mother" the kids rolled their eyes, but totally thought it was funny as well. 

The van is mostly fixed at this point, it's drivable now, which is great. We still need to take the door apart because there is an issue with the latch on that, but having three vehicles again is super helpful! 

Hannah has this entire week off of school for Thanksgiving and then has one day of class and finals, then she'll be done for the semester! 

It has been another busy week in the house hold. I’m really wondering if we’ll ever normalize out. The younger three saw two shows this past weekend. Beauty and the Beast on Friday, which I went to with them and then a Sherlock Holmes play put on by the theater company they are a part of. We really should have known better regarding Beauty and the Beast….the one they were in was so good, it would be hard for any kid’s theater program to match that….but this one unfortunately was not even close. I was hoping it’d be good because it was a theater group in our town…..but the one put on by their troupe they said was pretty good. Unfortunately they rehearsed on Thursday nights, so the kids couldn’t do that one because they have youth group that night. We’re still trying to figure out the next show for them. 

That along with all four heading out for lunch after church kept the weekend pretty busy. We were also trying to troubleshoot an electrical problem with the van we just bought, as the battery light went on when I was driving around last week. We got an alternator, as that is what Nathan thought it was, but then he second guessed that and today ended up stuck on the side of the road. He and the boys are now putting in the new alternator.

Hannah heard back from one of the animal hospitals she contacted regarding shadowing, so she’ll be doing that tomorrow. It’s one of the requirements for the vet tech program to shadow two vet techs for four hours each. 

Damen and Kaleb have gotten back into working out and tossing a football around since having taken a break when they were in Fort Wayne. Unfortunately Damen’s phone had an unfortunate encounter with a hard object resulting in the phone being rendered unusable. 

We also caught our first real drone show from our backyard. It was super impressive! There were actually two of them, there was a break in between, so we thought it was over but looked out a little later and a second one was going on. 

Oh, the other excitement of the week was Evie getting showered in glass. Thankfully she wasn’t hurt or cut at all! But Damen hit the lampshade and it broke all over Evie.

Here you can see the mess above and below is a shard that got stuck in the wall!

Snow! And Indiana

 We got our first snowfall of the year last week. It started on Thursday and continued on Friday. 

Thursday the kids headed to youth group and enjoyed packing shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child. They had a lot of fun and made some new friends along the way. I am so thankful for our church and how the kids have connected with people there! 

Our flight for Fort Wayne departed on Friday. This lead to a long delay, but we made it out, which was great because there were a lot of flights that were canceled. Our flight was from Denver to Chicago, from there we picked up a rental car and drove to Fort Wayne. I was thankful we didn't have a connection, because I'm pretty sure we would have missed that. As it was we didn't get into Fort Wayne until 2:30 am. Fortunately that's only like 12:30 am Mountain time, so it wasn't too bad. But I did have to drive through a lot of fog and it was an unfamiliar fancy newish (2023 camry) with various bells and whistles that were super frustrating and I couldn't figure out how to turn off. Such as automatically turning on the high beams for me, brilliant in fog. Or turning them off when it saw a traffic light thinking it was another car. Anyway, we made it out of Chicago with lots of people passing us with their hazards on (what's up with that?!) and saw three deer and hit zero. We crashed in the hotel and then started bright and early visiting with friends. The boys let the hotel Saturday at 8:15 am and didn't return until Sunday at 11 am. Where they showered and crashed until 4 pm and then were not back at the hotel the rest of our time in Fort Wayne. They had a ton of fun with friends and had two sleepovers with very little sleep. Evie took an hour and a half nap Saturday and then was off to see her friends in Mill Girls for both the matinee and 7 pm show. The director was kind enough to allow her to hang out with people while they were eating between shows. After the 7 pm show we went out to Culvers and hung out with people there until almost midnight. Evie and I enjoyed having our own bed in the hotel room while the boys had a sleepover. Evie slept in on Sunday, while I got up and went and picked up the boys. Once I got back I got Evie "breakfast" made sure the boys were actually going to get some sleep and headed over to some friends for football. It was a low key afternoon with some cookie making, which was great.  We then picked the boys up and saw other friends for dinner, the kids headed to youth group and we hung out a little more after youth group and the boys slept over. Monday morning was low key with some other friends and just what everyone needed. We headed back to Chicago with the sketchy drivers (one person decided to pretend to shoot us making a gun with his fingers! And we nearly got into an accident as someone pulled out in front of us when they shouldn't have, I had to swerve and hit the breaks hard enough that the ABS engaged), and made it to the air port. Thankfully the flight home was uneventful and Nathan had picked up the minivan (the dealer was fixing a few small things for us) and picked us up in that. Having the extra room was amazing! Did I mention the minivan is from Honda of Clear Lake, as in Clear Lake Texas, right by our house when we lived there? We had actually looked at minivans they had when buying our first one. Such a small world  sometimes. 

Evie got this amazing picture with the big dipper out her plane window on the way home! 

We flew Frontier airlines, which is super cheap and I also appreciated because without paying for seats they seated me with my kids that were under 16. Which meant Evie could sit with the boys and I could take Evie's random seat with the scary strangers 😁 The kids enjoyed sitting together on the flights.

The boys after their first sleepover with their friends

Evie, at the show with friends

Snow!! There is still a little bit around here and there, but Charlie and I went for our Tuesday morning walk and even though there was some snow I was in a t-shirt and it was a beautiful sunny day!!

Nathan and Hannah made it through the weekend without us and Nathan at least was happy we were back, but I think that Charlie was the most excited that we had returned, she was jumping for joy when we came in! 

Today we were back to our regularly scheduled program and I was thankful for the extra vehicle and not having to bring Nathan into work before heading to theater with the kids. 

The vehicle shuffle

This past week has been another crazy one. We got all six of us to the dentist, and only one person had any cavities. The boys went on Halloween, and were like "why are we going to the dentist on Halloween, shouldn't we go after?" 

                               

Speaking of Halloween, Hannah went as someone working in a lab with her lab (lab) assistant Charlie. Evie was Red Ridding Hood and the boys were Men in Black. 

                               

They got more candy than any person needs, the above was after about an hour and a half, they then went out for another hour. They were super excited to be able to walk out the front door and go and not have any time restrictions. Both Michigan and Indiana had specific hours during which you could trick or treat. Needless to say they had a blast!

Hannah found a dog that had gotten away from her owners this week. She brought her home and tried calling them, but the call and text were not answered. I told her to just put her on a leash and go for a walk and she'd probably find them driving around slowly. It worked perfectly! 

In regards to the vehicle shuffle, we decided to just sell the RV to the dealership, since it failed to sell on consignment. This meant we took a pretty big loss, but we don't have to deal with it anymore. Since that decision was made we were able to get rid of the truck, so we went car shopping on Saturday. We traded the truck in because we didn't want to deal with selling it ourselves. What we learned though is if we trade in a vehicle that is worth more than what you are buying you don't have to pay tax on what you're buying. That was kind of nice. We bought a honda civic from one dealership and a honda odyssey from another dealership. We were able to drive the civic home and are waiting for a couple things to be fixed on the odyssey, but are hoping to get it tomorrow.  

On Sunday there was a thing for new people after service, so five of us stayed for that and all squished into the civic on the way home, it was quite comical. 

Today the kids had theater and while they are there Charlie and I go for a walk at a open space that allows dogs off leash. It's Charlie's favorite place to go, but after walking for an hour and a half she's quite tired. And she found the only puddle in the place and decided to lay down in it, so she was also wet. The boys got to squish in with her on the way home.

Charlie running free! 

The mountains are getting lots of snow! It has been so fun to watch them get more and more snow over the last couple weeks. They are beautiful!