This is a year of change for my family. At the beginning of the year, my Nanny moved from the house she has lived in my whole life to an apartment closer to town. Due to a lack of space at her new place, we gathered at my Auntie Kay's house (which sounds very similar to our friend Anna Kate and causes a lot of confusion with Reese).
This was a few weeks ago, but look at that face.
Thanksgiving is my very favorite holiday. It's not about gifts or any of that. It's just about getting together with those you love the most....and eating dressing. Really, it's all about the dressing.
It's also about my girls having on cute, matching outfits and the joy that abounds when I try to get a decent picture of them together. It is always very pleasant.
Reese. God love her. She is going through this stage of making the strangest faces when I tell her to smile. It pains me. Let me tell you what else pains me. My sister. I ask her to take our picture. So we are smiling and telling the girls to "look at Aunt Heather"...I check the phone and instead of making pictures that woman had recorded 3 videos of us smiling like dummies. (She about ruined the moment when we unveiled the pink balloons at Elynn's gender reveal by causing every picture to be blurry. I told her then that she was fired, but that had slipped my mind last week.) I should have known when I asked her to take the picture and she replied with, "but I ain't got my glasses on" that I needed to round up another photographer.
The kid table that is quickly turning into the teenager table. Sniff, sniff.
While I was busy teaching the kids a few things about yard ball, Reese was sitting on the sideline being a little mommy.
There were no injuries reported during the game, but my legs are still a little sore. Some of the kids resorted to violence in order to stop touchdown passes.
Exhibit A concerning the faces Reese makes. I have somewhere around 13 others similar to this on my phone.
Sniff. Sniff. I could almost swear that it was just yesterday that I was changing the diapers of these 2 big kids. I will never forget the time I was keeping them both when Clay was a little over 3 and Jolie was a few months old. While I was trying to buckle Jolie into her bounce seat, Clay pulled a plastic bowl of pineapples (which originally came in a can- cause I was Suzy homemaker like that) off of a shelf in the refrigerator onto his face and in his eyes. That was my very first experience with child-like pandemonium. He FREAKED out when the pineapple juice got in his eyes. Which, of course, that was prior to the time that, while under my supervision, he drove his 4-wheeler through the barbed wire fence. I shiver at the thought of what could have happened that day. We rushed him to the emergency room, and a few years later he had to have some reconstructive surgery to make the scars smaller, but that doesn't make me feel guilty. Not at all. They taught me a lot about little people, and I love them like they are mine. (If their mother had had any sense in her head, she would have refused to let them stay with me.)
This girl ate her weight in cucumbers! (But she gags when I give her mashed potatoes. I don't even pretend to understand.)
Reese is loving her to death in this picture. This is the norm, and I'm worried about how mean Elynn is going to be because of all of it.
We left Auntie Kay's and went for round 2 at Adam's Granny's house where Reese found her other favorite people waiting to play.
