Groves Santa Night 2018

Groves Elementary has Santa Night the first week of December every year.  They have all sorts of activities going on and a chance to visit with Santa.  The line for Santa is usually quite long, but we were able to go over early this year and get in line.  I stood in line while the kids walked around.  I can't believe so  many of my kids are starting to be too old for these things.  I remember going to the Riverton city visit from Santa after Thanksgiving a couple of times when we lived in Utah and how I miss when my kids were all little and liked doing things like that together as a family!

Creche Festival in Allen

One of our favorite Christmas traditions here in Texas is going to the Allen Creche Festival every year.  It usually runs the first week of December.  The Allen stake puts it together and it is free.  We love looking at the nativity scenes from all over the world and listening to the beautiful music as we walk through.  It is a great way to start off our Christmas season every year!

Orchestra Concert

Eliza had her first orchestra concert this week.  She is in the after-school fifth grade orchestra that meets twice a week.  If she chooses to continue, she'll have to switch schools and go to Davis and then McMillan J.H.  I'm not sure she'll want to do that.  I'd be okay with it if she chose to go there and continue with orchestra, but we'll let her choose.

She had to choose someone in the audience from her family to teach how to pluck the strings.  So she chose Dad.  She showed him how to hold the violin and how to pluck the strings.  She was so excited for this part of the concert.

Thanksgiving Day

My pies always come out looking funky, but they taste good anyway!  This was the cherry and the pumpkin pie that I made.  We also had an apple pie.

We took advantage of some movie gift cards that Nana gave us for Christmas last year and went to see the new "Ralph Breaks the Internet" movie.  It was a cute, fun movie but the little ones still aren't quite ready to sit through a whole movie in the theatre. 

Thanksgiving Break Fun Times

We made some sugar cookies for fun.  I don't really enjoy making them, and now it's so nice that the older kids can organize the whole thing, including making the actual cookies, only with a little guidance here and there from me.  I do enjoy eating the sugar cookies though!

We also enjoyed an excursion to the Heard Museum in McKinney.  They had their dinosaur exhibit out again, which is always fun to see. 

Panthers Football Season Ends!

Travis and Eliza's football season finally came to an end. We had a really rainy season with a lot of rescheduled games. I felt frustrated some of the time with all that happened, but I did enjoy coaching the cheer squad and having Eliza on my squad. I look forward to watching Travis play football in the future.

November Fun

Just a little random fun in November.  Jonah got to help with morning announcements at school; we bought Nathan underwear (we'll see how this goes), and I was goofing off with the kids and my phone.