November 2016

I can't believe November is already over and we are in to December - its my favorite time of the year!! For the first week of Nov, Ryan and I were in Thailand, so these first few pictures are from when Rhonda & Lee were watching the kiddos. 

Griffin enjoying the computers at the library

An eagle scout donated this awesome lego table to the library for his project. Jaxson loves it! 

Saturday morning craft at home depot with the kiddos. Thanks again Lee & Rhonda for watching the kids! 

At this point in the month, we are back home and life is back to normal. Avery loves dressing up and putting on makeup. She dressed up like Elsa this day so she could watch frozen. What's funny is that she only watched a few minutes of it before she started wrestling and playing with Griffin - that is more like the Avery we know. Tom boy and we love her for it!

When I see things like this, when my kids are playing nice together, it melts my heart. Jaxson was doing homework on the ipad and Griffin was just sitting by him and watching :)

November 16th was the anniversary of Harry Potter first being on the big screen. We celebrated with butter beer and pancakes.

We had our first good snow this month and these kids were SO excited to go out and play in it.

Jaxson received an award at school for good behavior. We watched him get recognized ins his school assembly and then all the parents/students of the kids had a cookie party.

The kids thought it was pretty fun taking pictures with the school mascot. 

Date night with Ryan - we went to MOD pizza (yum!) and out to a movie.

The next day, we drove up to Broomfield to watch Fantastic Beasts - our realtor rented out a good portion of the theater for a customer appreciation day. Before the movie started, we walked around the mall area and found this awesome giant size checkers board.

Pre-birthday dinner and cake for Griffin. His birthday was on Thanksgiving day this year, so the Sunday before we had some yummy food and cake. Happy Birthday Griffin!!

Julie and her family came to see us Thanksgiving week. Avery and the twins (Faye & Anne) had so much fun playing together!

Jaxson and Claire played so well together too!

We took the kids to tour the Hammond candy factory - yum!

Thanksgiving morning/Griffin's birthday. We are so grateful you are in our life buddy - you bright us so much joy and happiness with your bright spirit!

 Julie & I made a feast for us all to enjoy on Thanksgiving ... yum, best meal of the year!!

Happy Thanksgiving! So fun that Julie & Brian's family could be there celebrating with us!

After the turkey dinner, we let Griffin open presents and we ate cake. He loved the cars, masks, etch e sketch, etc. Thank you everyone!

He liked the cake, I promise! Looks like I should have snapped a few more pics - oops!

On Thursday night after the kids were in bed, the ladies went black friday shopping until 2am. So much laughing and fun - can't wait to do it again!

On Saturday morning, we went to the park

We also took the Brinkerhoff's to the reservoir nearby to show them around. Love how pretty the sunset was that day, but man was it cold!!

Morning snuggling while watching cartoons

November was such a fun month! We are excited and are loving December already :)

Thailand Part 3 - 2016

The day after our elephant tour, we caught a plane from the top part of Thailand (Chiang Mai) to the bottom (Phuket). We had the yummiest breakfast we could find in the airport. I definitly was not complaining! 

We stayed near Patong beach. It was pretty, but really quite overcast and rainy the day we arrived. 

My sister in law, Leslie, told me I had to try a mangosteen. I searched everywhere and finally found this yummy fruit. 

This is what it looks like on the inside - how cool is that?!

Our second day in Phuket was a bout/kayak tour of some of the islands. This was our other favorite thing we did in Thailand - so cool! Everything looked like it was out of a magazine! 

Some of the caves we went into were so low, we had to lay completly flat on the kayak and hope our faces didn't get scratched!

We got a little bit of free time to work our hands at kayaking. It was really fun!

We swam in one of the lagoon areas

And in the caves too

In one of the Hongs ("Room" in Thailand), we saw this cool looking animal. It looked like a frog in the front but had a fin like structure at its rear. A Hong is a big circular opening in the middle of the rock/island. We had to lay down on the kayak to get into them because the opening was so close to the water. Once we got inside, it was so neat to see the tall cliff faces with beautiful greenery. Such a cool experience! 

Towards the end of the night we made these pretty plant structures made from banana tree trunk, banana leaves, and flowers. When it was dark, we lit the candles on fire and floated them in the ocean. It is the Thai people's way of saying thank you to God for the water. 

A gorgeous susnset with the love of my life. Happy 10 years cutie!!

Our last day we caught a flight up to Bangkok and went to their big weekend market. We enjoyed some yummy treats and foot massages. Ryan was a good sport walking around and looking at souvenirs for hours :) 

We also saw these delicacies but decided to pass - no thank you! And if you wonering if they are real, the answer is yes! Its funny, the man was actually charging people to take photos of them - I guess he probably makes way more money doing that than actually selling the bugs! 

It was a long & tiring trip home, but it was so good to be back. The kids all gave me the best hugs, especially Griffin. He hugged me for about 5 minutes and gave me a big kiss. My heart melted!! I love those kiddos so much!

Griffin sporting his new elephant pants.

Jaxson loved the yoda shirt we found him at the market.

A huge thanks to Rhonda & Lee for watching our kiddos and keeping them safe while we were gone! They had such a fun time and we so appreciate it!!