OUR PLANS MULTIPLIED: Thanksgiving

OUR PLANS MULTIPLIED

In the beginning, JD adamantly only wanted two children. I thought that four would be perfect. Once we caught God's vision of putting orphans into families, our plan was multiplied by God. We are currently blessed with 12 children; five biological, six adopted and one more waiting in Ethiopia. Our first adoption was from the U.S., the next three were from Liberia, West Africa, and our last two were from Ethiopia. We are supporting our 12th child in Ethiopia after her adoption could not pass court.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Thanksgiving

We had a quieter Thanksgiving than usual this year, which enabled me to do a few things that I always think about, but never get done. The kids helped cook more of the dishes - Tori and Julia are both exceptionally helpful in the kitchen for seven and eight year olds.

Tori cooking fresh cranberries

We cooked and froze several pumpkins a few days ago, but Julia wanted to do another. Good for me, only four to go this week.

I did a simple Thanksgiving turkey craft with the kids. We made paper plate turkeys and wrote something we were thankful for on the feathers. After dinner, and a book about the first Thanksgiving, each child showed their turkeys and read their thankful list. I don't have any pictures because JD videoed it instead, but some of my favorites were Selah was thankful for "turkeys and roosters" and Elijah was "thankful for remote controlled spiders and all the things in the world, other than the nasty stuff".

We have always been big black Friday shoppers, but I refuse to shop on Thanksgiving day, so I missed most of it this year. My daughters, however, headed out in the evening and shopped all night until I met up with them Friday morning for breakfast.

Alei plotting her plan

JD does the turkey and ham on holidays.

We only had one guest, a friend of Aunt Deb's, but we decided to set up the food on one table and eat on the other to allow more people room.

I normally don't decorate for Christmas until the weekend after Thanksgiving, but it's a shorter span between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, so we got a head-start. After shopping, we put the Christmas tree up. Tomorrow, I'll work on the other Christmas items.

Bella earned some ipad time by not crying in the bathtub. For months she has been crying her whole bath, so I created the idea that puzzles on the ipad are a reward for not crying in the bathtub. There have been many, many days of Selah getting to play, but Bella pulled it together last night for her bath and earned her time today.