Abundant Recompense Copy

This year we hosted Thanksgiving at our house! We enjoyed having members from both sides of the family around. We got to have Jenna and Preston and Toby around for a couple weeks while they were in the midst of a cross-country move. These kids adore them! Bri and Mason came for Thanksgiving and got us all off our behinds to go do a day-of Turkey Trot. The weather was just so beautiful, and it was lovely to be outside getting sweaty. We enjoyed spending time as a family in the kitchen. We ended up with some good eats. Preston's cheese grits were my personal faves. The Aarons came for the big dinner and we had a packed house full of good feelings and good food. And our thankful tree. So many blessings.

I just found this little gem from summer of 2015 and had to post it. This is our daughters, to a tee. Love 'em both to pieces.

We are so lucky to have Nate's mom for so many reasons. This past November she agreed, yet again, to do some family pictures for us. She does such a great job and is so patient with us as we herd the kids around and rearrange things a billion times. I think they turned out awesome. Here are some of our favorites. Nate and I laughed our heads off at this one. Luckily this one redeems him.

As a family, we've been trying to set aside a little bit of money each month so we can go do fun things in the area together. It's been a lot of fun, and it's really helped to teach our kids some important things about money. They get to be involved in choosing what activities we do, and then we look up the cost and decide how long we'll have to save to be able to make it happen. Last school year Addison went on a field trip to the Living Planet Aquarium, and raved about it. Then people from the aquarium visited Bryn's class and brought some cool animals for them to see and touch. They both liked it so much that they decided our family should visit. So we saved for a few months and got to go. It was really cool! Lots of underwater animals, as well as bugs and reptiles and birds. There were even ladybugs crawling all over the place that you could pick up. Included in the cost of admission was unlimited access to their educational 20 minute movies, so we watched two o...