Holiday Catch-Up Part 1: Thanksgiving

Okay... catch up time! Like everything else gone wrong in these nine months, I'm going to blame pregnancy on how I got so behind on the blog. 

Right, pregnancy! For the sake of family scrapbooking... we found out we were pregnant just a few weeks before Thanksgiving. After the hardest year of our marriage (maybe life).... from the miscarriage, to the month after month of negative pregnancy tests, to our house literally falling apart, financial roller coasters, a tornado, and everything in between... this positive pregnancy test felt like a glimpse of hope from the Lord saying: This year, I am giving you rest! I'm claiming it as our sabbatical year, even though I know we can never escape from death and decay on this side of heaven.

Anyway, this put me at right about 5 1/2 weeks at Thanksgiving which meant a whole lot of food aversions on the day when you DO NOT want to have food aversions. But food is not what Thanksgiving is really about, right? We spent the weekend at Lake Martin with Andrew's family being grateful... for the hard and the beautiful from our year. 

Wilson spent the weekend being thankful for The Three Stooges. Because Andrew found them on You Tube and this is really what the whole weekend looked like: 

Now that we have more kiddos and live farther apart, time spent with these cousins are so very precious to us. Wilson just adores Madelyn and Brooks and he is starting to realize that Blake and Cooper aren't babies anymore and will soon be able to keep up with him.

Baba and Grandan are such troopers to put up with a FULL house of loud littles.

The first time we were all at the lake after B & C were born, I said to Andrew... "This feels like a perpetual run of the first scene in Home Alone." You know, where there are cousins and chaos every where and Kevin says, "This house is so full of people it makes me sick. When I grow up and get married, I'm living alone. I'm living alone! I'm living alone!"

Well, I disagree, Kevin. I think it's kind of awesome.

We even managed to get one pretty amazing photo of ALL of us. Never mind that it took 15 tries. 

I've said this before on here, but I really am amazed that by some miracle I ended up in such a precious family. Andrew's parents are so incredibly generous to all of us... and most precious to us is the time and energy they give during lake weekends like this. Baba goes to great lengths to make everything so special and memorable for the kids. 

Although I sure miss my Thanksgivings in Kentucky, these lake Thanksgivings are growing on me. The slow pace, the read-a-whole-book-if-you-want mentality, the s'mores over bonfires, the falling asleep on a hammock by the water.... and the littles. All the precious littles...