Happy Thanksgiving!

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We had planned to split the day between Ryan's family and my family but had to change plans at the last minute. Olivia woke up from her afternoon nap Wednesday with a fever and by Thursday had a runny nose too. Ryan's cousin has a new baby (Yeah!) and we didn't want to take any chances with bringing our germy family to their house for dinner. We missed them :( and I was so disappointed I didn't get to hold Baby Ethan.

But thankfully, we also had an invite to Misti's house, with Lynee and the kids, and little Sureya was also sick so we didn't have to worry about contamination. Misti is an amazing cook and we had lots of extra hands to make the afternoon relaxing!

We are so thankful for our wonderful family and great friends!

"In the Trees"

On our drive home from church on Sunday, Chase pointed out his window at the tree line and asked what it was. Ryan told him it was trees and we call it a forest. Chase replied, "I want to go in there." And so that is what we did, after lunch and naps of course. We went to the nature trail and took the kids on a great walk. Olivia was so cute. She would walk a few steps and then squat down and point at the dirt (she sees me doing that when we find ants or bugs). Chase loves being outdoors and enjoyed picking up the biggest branches he could find and dragging them down the path.

It was such a sweet adventure! (It would have been more relaxing if speeding bicycles didn't fly by every 10 minutes, forcing me to scream "BIKE- DO YOU HAVE HIS HAND?" in my super panicked voice with a scared out of my mind look on my face)

We did enjoy a great acorn fight. I shielded myself well behind Olivia (was that wrong?)

Wow! Where has the year gone? Time has been flying by- our little girl is about to turn one. She is running around the house. Her favorite game is "Let's hide from Mommy", which is so cute but makes it difficult to get any work done because every 10 second I have to run and find her. She is building a little vocabulary which now includes, Daddy, bye, ball, gak gak (which Ryan thinks means Thank you), she loves to say Putah but we have no idea what it means. We all walk around the house saying putah with her.
Chase has been hard at work learning to use the potty the past few weeks. He started really strong and was doing great with only an occasional accident every couple of days, but he seems to have lost some interest this weekend and at times refuses to use the potty. We are giving him some room to decide he is fully ready to commit to potty, it is a big decision.