November Activities

-We did our annual family pics on the 1st through Camera Shy. I've always loved going to them, but this time it ended up costing me WAY more money than usual because they forced me to buy a prints package and tricked me with the options (they only offered 2 and the cheapest one was $500!). I'm glad we at least got cute pics and a new canvas out of it, but I doubt I'll be using them again. Pierce was NOT into it so that was a struggle, but I'm not surprised and we did get some smiley-ish ones of him. Finding outfits was SO hard (I had some picked out and just kept changing who was wearing what or what would go well together. I bought TONS of online outfits since I couldn't find anything in stores), but what we found some that worked well enough (nothing that we ended up with is what I started out with though, haha)

-After pictures, we grabbed some lunch from Subway and had a "picnic" at Murray park with Wilsons (Don, Tracy, Tori, Tanner, Lilly, Eli, and Chloe). The kids had a lot of fun at the two play grounds. Poor Tracy was sick with possible food poisoning. Eli and Chloe don't talk much and left early, but it's good to see him happy. We had lots of fun chit chatting with the rest though. We ended up staying for quite a few hours (which always seems to happen with them).

-I started Christmas shopping on the 2nd (and got one whole family done right away) and then went about every Sunday this month. I also went to the Christmas show with Mom on the 15th and got some good stuff for the kids there (I definitely have to go there every year, there are so many good things). I am really wanting to be intentional with my gifts, not just grab stuff I think someone/anyone will like and figure it all out later (I also need to limit the sugar items for the kids...they still have Halloween candy for crying out loud). Additionally, I had the kids pick out present ideas from Amazon's toy catalog to make their wish lists, I figured I'd buy them 3-4 of what they ask for and then the rest will be things I think they'd like, or could use, plus some clothing items. We did hit up an actual mall one weekend, which was great because I FINALLY found some Labubu's for the girls (which they've been begging for). While we were there, we let the kids play in the play area and ran into Andy and Rachel (random!). I finished the bulk of my shopping the week of Thanksgiving - I feel SO head of the game. I've been wrapping a handful of gifts each night to Hallmark/Christmas movies, which is the best (I also love having my own room to store the gifts this time!) and it's nice to not feel overwhelmed with so much wrapping at once and I feel I've forgotten the things I started wrapping so it'll be a nice surprise wen Christmas morning comes!

My biggest shopping day

-I had the unfortunate experience of my computer crashing...HARD earlier this month. I was checking on a fun event for the kids and the site had me verify I wasn't a robot, but it made me paste something in my run screen (which I did so fast and didn't realize what I was doing until I had already done it). I had Larry run a scan and it said it found nothing, but he looked it up and found it can be harder for scans to find so we did a reset and it just wouldn't start back up (see my sad shot below). My biggest concern was pictures and my documents, but luckily all of that was on my One Drive (or Amazon Photo Cloud thing) so once I got a computer we could load it all back up. My regular computer is old, but works amazing and I really didn't want to buy a new one (plus we can't find any that are the same size) so Larry did a BIG reset on this computer and it took basically all day long on the 8th to get up again. I didn't love that, but glad to have mine back! Hackers are the devil!

-Our neighbor's son (Jason) was in a play at Lehi community theater the night of the 13th and they invited me and the older girls to come to see it. It was at a fun, small theater, it was a musical play where some kids were imagineers teaching the other kids about how to make dreams come true. Jason had a solo, singing Lion King's "I just can't wait to be king". It was such a fun and cute play and totally made me want to sign the kids up for this (if they want. If this existed when I was a kid I might have done it).

-Gwen got to have her 1:1s. Larry took her out to Crumbl, on the 18th, while I walked Costco with the rest of the kids (we went out to dinner together in the area so it made more sent to drop us off at Costco while they did their thing). I was doing Christmas shopping and then he surprised us so one of his gifts got ruined (oh well). He then took the kids and I grabbed some stuff for them that I saw. On the 20th, I took her to Wal Mart. She got a lot of birthday money so she got to buy a watch she REALLY wanted and then I got her some new PJs that came with an eye mask (she was really excited about). It was another dinner out so Larry walked Wal Mart with the other kids while I took her so it was kind of different than usual, but she got some goodies so she was happy.

Costco shopping made comfy

-We got our annual Cabela's Santa pic done on the 26th. I love doing this and Larry's starting to like it too. In fact, we booked a breakfast with Santa event next month and I asked Larry if we should even do Cabela's since we'll probably get a picture at the breakfast, but he said we still should do the Cabela's one so we have it to add to our stack of other ones haha. The kids are starting to put together that the Santa's we visit aren't the real deal (there are WAY too many opportunities to meet him, I can't fully blame them for being suspicious). We also almost lost the picture this year (Larry accidentally left it behind), but luckily he went back and found it quickly.

It's crazy how much the kids have grown
Since we started this tradition!

-And my favorite pics of the kids:

Cara wearing Pierce's tiny shoes

He may be older, but he'll still nap on me
Once in a while