Thanksgiving Eve

It's Thanksgiving Eve, and my little family and I are in Virginia celebrating by ourselves this year.  It was just not in the cards to fly out West this year.  Hopefully next year! I can't help but feel a little homesick knowing that both of our families are getting together right now. Have fun without us you guys! :)

November has brought a few changes for our family that I want to document for posterity sake.  We currently are camerless because of a broken lense, but hopefully Santa will bring us one so we can get some recent pictures of our family! Sorry for the lame picture-less post!

-We found out the Greg will be deploying to Afghanistan mid-March for work for 6 months.  We knew that he would be going, but he wasn't suppose to be leaving until September of next year. His office was having trouble filling a certain deployment position, so they asked Greg to deploy earlier.  It will be a hard  transition for our family, but we felt that it was a good thing to do, so we are moving forward with faith that all will be well.  The boys and I will be living with my family in Wyoming while he is gone.  I am really excited to spend so much time with my family, especially for my boys.  There is no way I could stay out in Virginia by myself for 6 months while Greg is gone, so I am grateful that my parents are opening their home to us for a short time.

I have thought a lot about the fact that we will not see Greg for 6 months, and I can't quite wrap my head around it.  We were a part summer before last for a month while Greg was in Israel for a school trip, and I thought that was hard.  Six months is a long time! I plan on flying out a few days before Greg leaves, and I can tell right now that will be one hard goodbye.  Saying goodbye for 6 months at an airport sounds really depressing to me. :( We will survive though!

-Experiencing a Virginia Fall is so weird to me.  Its almost December and we are still in the 50's and 60's. I have so many memories of Thanksgiving back home where it was FREEZING.  The local news station put out their Winter Weather Forecast a couple of weeks ago and they are predicting we will have a snowy winter.  Meaning, we will get 7-12 inches of snow! Having lived in Wyoming, Rexburg, and then Syracuse, this is pretty much a joke.  But I will take it! It will be nice having a winter where we don't have to dig our car out of huge drifts.

-Kayden is 20 months old now.  Crazy! He talks like crazy, runs around like crazy, and tortures his brother like crazy.  He is an early bird (meaning he is up before 6:30 and sometimes even 6 most mornings).  I am an early person by nature, but I honestly prefer spending my early mornings working out, so this is not my all time favorite things.  But we manage!  He is a great sleeper though.  He goes down for bed around 7 and will sleep 10-11 straight.  That is one things that I enjoy about this stage; they sleep through the night!  He is such a sweet little boy. Everyday I look at him and think, "Where did my baby go?!" They grow up so fast!

He out of nowhere decided that he was done nursing this week.  Before that, I was only nursing him right before bed, so I knew we were almost done, but he just stopped so quickly that it kind of caught me off guard.  I love nursing.  I am a huge advocate for nursing past 12 months, so it is sad for me to be done.  But he is ready, so this is what we're doing!

-Deagan is your typical 4 year old boy! He loves to run and play, and he finds potty talk quite hilarious. :) He says 90% of the prayers around our house, and it is just so sweet to listen to a 4 year old prayer.  They are so sincere and cute.  Tonight at evening prayer he prayed that I will be nice. :) I obviously need to work on my patience I guess! We have a weekly tradition of having him stay up late one night on the weekend to watch a movie with us.  Its one of his favorite traditions! He also really loves doing Family Home Evening.  He asks almost every night if we can do Home Evening.  He is so smart and his logic to things just blows me away sometimes.  He is a real joy to have in our family!

-Not much has changed for me this month.  I am continuing to work with a friend as her personal trainer, and I love it.  Life tends to feel the same day after day, but life is good so I can't complain.  I have had a few health issues come up this month that have been challenging, but nothing life threatening.  Its just hard to have things not go the way you hope they would! Thats a life lesson that I am sure I will continue to learn the rest of my life.

We truly are grateful this Thanksgiving season for all that we have been blessed with since we moved here.  Life is good!!

Dad's Visit

My dad is the greatest. He took off 4 days of work to come visit us from the 19th through the 24th if October. His main purpose of coming out here was to watch the boys over night so Greg and I could go away for our Anniversary (which was on the 21st; I am so behind on blogging!).

But he did so much for us than that! He bought us groceries, played with the kids non-stop, carved pumpkins with us, took us to the movies, he played at the park with us, and so much more! It was seriously a great visit! My dad is such a good grandpa to our boys. Those little ones are sooooo blessed!

Some of my favorite memories of his trip:

-We rode the metro downtown to see the sights and ended up walking over 5 miles that day. We had so much fun! Every where we went we had people making comments about the color of our boys hair. We were at the Jefferson Memorial and this group of Oriental men were pointing to and talking about our boys. They seemed very amusedly them, so one of them came over and grabbed Deagan to take a picture with him!! I was shocked and scared for a minute but then they went on their way. It was so creepy!
We might have to make our kids wear hats in public so they don't stand out so much!

-My dad watched the boys over night on our anniversary. I wanted to get the boys to bed before we left, but we were running late so it didn't happen. I gave my dad instructions on what to do to get them down and prayed that they would go down ok for him. Deagan informed me when we were leaving that he was not going to go to sleep that night. "Yea right!" I thought. Kayden seemed totally unfazed by us leaving so I was hopeful that things would go well.
We got home the next day and asked my dad how things went. This was his report:
-Kayden started crying for you around 10:30 (10:30?! He goes to bed normally around 7!!). There was nothing I could do for him to help so I just turned on the TV to see if that would distract him.
-Kayden must have fallen asleep because when I woke up at 1:30 he was asleep in my lap, but Deagan was still going strong. (1:30?!?) I told him it was time time to go to sleep finally and we all fell asleep on the (full size) futon couch.
-The next morning Kayden woke up at 5:30 but Deagan slept in. We had fun!

My poor dad. What a trooper!! But he said he had fun. I wish I thought staying up all night with kids was fun!

The trip went by so quick but the time he was here was so great.

Thanks for coming out dad!! You (and anyone else) is welcome anytime!

Halloween 2011

I have to say that even though Halloween is not my favorite holiday I enjoyed celebrating it with my family this year a lot more than I thought I would! There is something about seeing your kids have fun that's makes it worth it.

Our kids played musical costumes this year. Deagan started out as Francesco from Cars 2 but then decided he wanted to wear his batman pj's for our ward trunk or treat. Then yesterday before we went trick or treating he wanted to be Buzz Lightyear from last year. Kayden started out as a dinosaur that Deagan wore a couple of years ago. Then wore Deagan's Buzz Lightyear pj's since Deagan was Buzz. Confusing right? Either way they both had fun and got a ton of candy. That's what matters right? ;)

We carved pumpkin when my dad was visiting a couple of weeks ago. We carved them on a Saturday and by Tuesday they were really moldy and gross. That's what living in a humid climate will do for you! But it was still a fun tradition to do anyway.

Funny Deagan story: after lunch today Deagan was eating a sucker and said that he had had way too much sugar so he went and threw it away. Smart kid :)

Life sure has been crazy around here, so it is nice to sit down and write about our life and realize that we are so blessed. We have our struggles, but life is still so good.

I hope you and your family had a wonderful Halloween!