Kisses Come in Twos: Thanksgiving 2014

Well, since Christmas is over and the new year has started, I guess it's time I write a post about Thanksgiving. Of course, I had to make shirts for the kids. I saw a cute idea similar to these on a blog I read, so I altered it and got busy. The kids debuted them earlier in the week because, well, they were too cute to only wear once.

I also dug into my scraps and made Sarah a new turkey hairbow.

Here are close ups of the fronts (sorry, all the shirt pictures are phone pictures). Joseph's shirt has a glow in the dark heart.

Sarah's is glitter (obviously).

The backs are a list of things they are thankful for. I tried to get Joseph to help me make his list, but when I asked him about it and started listing possibilities, he said, "I not thankful for anything!" I almost put that on his shirt to document his two year old spunk (he really is thankful for all the stuff I listed and says he likes them, he's just a bit ornery these days).

I wrote about our Thanksgiving tradition of spending the entire weekend in Nash at Sam's parents house here (in looking for this I realized I didn't write a post last year, how did that happen!?), so I won't bore you with all that. I will say that this year was a little different from years past because Sam's younger brother, Ben, and his wife, Kim, had a baby the week before Thanksgiving, so they weren't able to be there. And now I'm realizing I haven't blogged about him either, so I'll go ahead and tell you that on November 20, 2014 Augustus Nash Parks aka Gus blessed us with his presence and this aunt is smitten!

We drove up Wednesday evening when Sam got off work so we wouldn't have to get up early Thursday morning. Somehow I ended up with two kiddos in bed with me while Sam slept on the couch that night.

Upon waking up Thanksgiving Day morning, Joseph eagerly helped Grandma make rolls.

She gave him his own ball of dough and rolling pin and he rolled the heck out of it to the point that it was not used for any actual rolls :).

Sarah eagerly watched and played with random kitchen tools while they worked.

We had plans for a late lunch at Sam's parents house, so Sam, the kids, and I headed up to the church to hang out at the big Parks' family lunch. Joseph played hide and seek with some older kids (it was adorable!) while Sarah happily hung out on Great-Grandpa Parks' lap. While they were doing this, Sam and I chatted with various family members and I managed to get a single picture to document the event.

When we got word that Ty had arrived, we headed back out to Sam's parents house for lunch. The rest of the day was spent hanging out and watching football. That night, I had the pleasure of sleeping with a sweet astronaut and Monster.

Friday, Sam and I enjoyed a beautiful country jog. It was fun to spend some time just me and him, no headphones or strollers, so much fun that we actually ended up running further than planned. He didn't run in front of me like this the whole time, I just stayed back a few seconds to take a picture.

While we were jogging, the kids happily hung out with Grandma.

When we got home, we had to take some pictures of the kiddos with the giant pumpkins the guys were going blow up later that day. Sarah was happy to oblige, but Joseph was busy being two and a half. Sorry there are so many, they make me smile.

We had lunch at the in-laws' café which I have decided our kids can never visit during business hours because they obviously don't realize it's a restaurant like we eat at sometimes. They seem to think it's just another house Poppy and Grandma have and that they run the place and no general eating out rules exist.

This year, the guys put some kind of explosives in the pumpkins before they shot them (Sam isn't around at the moment or I would ask him what it was). I will say it was pretty cool when they hit them. If you're interested in more pictures from a previous pumpkin shoot, you can find them here (they are from before I had any kind of camera smarts and sans explosives). Shooting pumpkins has become a yearly Thanksgiving tradition for the Parks boys.

I didn't last long into the trap shooting before I headed home.

Saturday morning, Sam's mom aided us in taking our yearly Christmas card picture. It's not an easy task to photograph two toddlers, two dogs, and a letter, so I truly appreciate her doing this. I loved this family picture, but the dogs weren't in it, so it wasn't Christmas card worthy.

When we changed locations, the kids and I were Sam's subjects as he adjusted camera settings. It's not my best picture, but look at Joseph's love for Sarah.

We had to bribe Joseph with tractor time to get him to take pictures with us. This face is one I see often with this ornery boy. The very next image was the tip top of his head as he jumped off the tractor tire.

During Joseph's tractor time, I took a few shots of our sweet girl and her daddy.

Look at the eyes on this girl! These are straight out of the camera (unedited) shots.

We wrangled Joseph back to the selected picture area and called the dogs over for a full family picture. Everybody looked great in this picture, but you can't see Aubrey's "A", so it wasn't Christmas card worthy either.

We didn't look quite as good in this picture, but we're all smiling and looking at the camera (with the exception of Bella), so it got to be the Christmas card centerfold.

We called it a day and let the little boy have some more tractor time. He was way too busy to pause and let me take his picture as you can tell from his expression here.