Holidays past and upcoming

Well, we're not very exciting now that the weather has gotten colder, and as such we haven't had as many adventures to tell you about as of late. However, we did spend a fun (and oh so tasty) Thanksgiving with Steve's family. I was lame, and totally forgot to take pictures. But here were some of the highlights:

We were able to go to our nephew Tyler's Eagle Scout Court of Honor. We are so proud of him and you could feel the family beaming all around. It was a great night.

We got to have a couple of family dinners and movie nights with family members who don't usually get to see which was really exciting!The Bennett women (3 generations - not including myself) made an amazing Thanksgiving dinner that we thoroughly enjoyed!

This was this year's annual desecration of Reva's Thanksgiving pilgrim figurines. That dastardly turkey is always up to something, and this year was no different. Poor pilgrim girl is only moments away from being launched. Steve and Ray spent much of the night before and Thanksgiving morning working on a tinker-toys trebuchet. And then we put it to good use. Brilliant Kathy, brilliant. I wish I'd thought to get a picture or video of Reva's response. So much fun!
We also spent some time letting Amanda play with pets. She is never sure if she likes the gliders on her or not, but we did get one good picture of her with a glider. Kathy also brought Sunshine and Confetti, Amanda's two parakeets which are some of our birds' chicks.
We had a great time visiting family and felt better leaving knowing that we'll be back in a month rather than 6+ months.

When we got back, it was officially time to decorate for Christmas! Steve is a firm believer that decorations don't come out until after Thanksgiving and was especially firm in this belief as our local stores began selling Christmas decorations in EARLY OCTOBER!

We haven't had time to put up outside lights yet as that will take both of us, a little warmer weather, and some daylight. But here's what we have so far. I did put a few lights up in our only street-facing window, which happens to be the animal room. It looks much cooler here with the reflection of the lights and the lights themselves. From outside it looks pretty sad...This is a Christmas present from Ray and Reva that I love.Another decoration I love which Steve and I gave ourselves. I love the gentle and loving feeling of Willow Tree nativities, and how human and personal they make the birth of Christ.Our Christmas tree! Our tree with all of our fun family-provided ornaments on our tiny tree from my parents. Maybe next year if we have more room we'll have a larger tree, but for now this one is fun and still provides a healthy dose of the Christmas spirit to our living room.And our nativity my parents got us. I love having a reminder in our home of the real meaning and purpose of the Christmas season.

Our last bit of news is that both of our cars are becoming quite temperamental. As a result, we will be needing the garage for some auto maintenance soon which finally prompted me to clean it. Really, it doesn't seem so impressive as it's still a major storage area for our extra stuff and still contains some packed boxes, but you should have seen what it looked like before. On second thought, you really shouldn't have. It was completely trashed after building two animal cages, searching through boxes for random packed items, and throwing all of our recycling out loose in the garage. But, no more! And now each time I go out into our storage facility called the garage it makes me smile, so I figured I'd share. It's the little things in life isn't it?