Conclusion of Thanksgiving

I know, it has been forever since I posted anything. So, I thought I would at least finish Thanksgiving. We decided that we needed to just take it easy and relax for the weekend. We knew that our kids don't like turkey dinner and it would be a lot of work for just the two of us. So, we opted to have ribs for dinner. The kids love ribs and we knew that they would be excited for it. When my parents found out that is what we were doing, they decided to come and try out our non-traditional Thanksgiving dinner with us.

After dinner, Grandpa got to read books to the kids while everyone else cleaned up.

Making Rolls

We may not have had the most traditional Thanksgiving dinner, but we had to have homemade rolls. The kids always want to help when Mom is baking. Here's our little helpers.

New Camera

After our trip to Legoland, Michelle and I started talking about how we should start looking into the possibility of getting a new camera. We bought the camera just before Tyler was born, so it is now over 5 years old.

Not too bad of a lifespan for electronics if you ask me. Our biggest complaint with it is that it has a proprietary battery.

After every charge it would give us the low battery indicator within about 5 pictures. We could continue to use it all day (like we did at Legoland), but we never knew just when we would be taking our last picture. So, I began looking at the point and shoot cameras on the market. Let's face it, neither one of us has the time to learn how to be a real photographer. As I did my research, I just couldn't justify the expense of a new camera. So, we never replaced it. Well, while we were out Trick or Treating on Halloween night, the camera got dropped. It still continued to work the rest of the night, so we didn't really notice the real damage. A few days later, Michelle tried to take some pictures of the kids in the back yard. Whe she tried to zoom in on them, she couldn't get the zoom to go. I took a look at it when I got home from work that night, and found that the drop caused a lot more damage than we thought. It still takes pictures, but none of the buttons work.

So, here is the replacement camera. I got it about a week and a half ago. I am still trying to figure out all of its features, but I like it so far. It has a much bigger zoom, image stabalization, 9 Megapixels, and it runs on AA batteries, so we can replace them anytime we need to. We bought rechargable ones to use, but just in case we forget to charge them, you can find AAs anywhere. So, all the pictures from now on will be with the new camera. I just hope that we like it.

Dinner Time

So if you don't like what's for dinner, just give up and go to sleep. We had chicken enchiladas for dinner the other night. The kids usually eat them without any problem. Meagan must have been really tired this night though. She sat down to see what was for dinner, took one look at it and decided to give up. By the time that everyone else was done eating, this is how she was.

Halloween

We went to Gilbert this year to celebrate Halloween with the kids' cousins. Rebecca was a '50s girl, Tyler a frog and Meagan a fairy princess with wings. All of these costumes had been worn by Rebecca in years past, but that is what each of them wanted to be.

The nice thing about Arizona Halloweens is that it isn't cold. Meagan walked around in her leotard all night and never complained about being cold.

Soccer Season

Rebecca and Tyler both played soccer this fall. They had their last game last Saturday. As fun as it is, and as much as they enjoyed it, we are glad that it is over. Practices every Tuesday and Thursday evening and games every Sat morning makes it hard to get much else done. Plus, I'm never around to help Michelle out during the week, so she had to do a lot of it on her own. Here are a few random shots taken throughout the season.







Michelle made the team banner for Rebecca's team. Obviously they were the "Blue Sharks". Each player has a shark with their name on it. The boys had grey sunglasses and the girls had white bows. I thought she did a really good job on it.

Consequences

I believe that there are consequences to all the decisions that we make in life. Sometimes the consequences are positive and sometimes they are negative. I chose not to plant a garden this summer or fall. As a consequence, I did not reap the benefits of having fresh produce. I also had the consequence of the kids always wanting to dig in the planter box. I chose to let the kids play in the planter box with the condition that they not get any of the dirt outside of the planter box. This is what they chose to do:

What should their consequence be?