Hallmark Moments....

The last 7 days have been scattered with many moments that just felt so good I had to pause and just soak it up into my soul with my toes curled.

Seriously, I remember sitting at the ice skating rink, thinking: This is it. This is how wonderful life can be.

We thoroughly enjoyed the week leading up to Thanksgiving and the days off…in our family.

The fun started with a Thanksgiving Feast for the 5th grade class at Nick’s school. Turkey, the trimmings and twelve silly and excited 5th graders.






















Thursday began with a leaf raking party! LOL! My kids have bemoaned the fact that when we moved to our bigger house, we lost the wonderful oak trees in the front yard that use to shed tons of lovely leaves in the fall. They loved raking them up and jumping into piles of leaves.

So… Momma had an idea.

I suggested and they enthusiastically agreed to go to neighbor's homes with their rakes pulling the little red wagon and volunteered to rake of the neighbor's yard, IF they could KEEP the leaves!

The neighbors were more than happy to comply...and they even picked a house where no one was home! Wagon-full after wagon-full made its way onto a big leaf pile in our treeless front-yard. Then the games began! Friday, when the lawn service showed up to mow, Mary begged them, PLEASE don’t take our leaves!!

























The Thanksgiving meal and company were great! With mom and dad and my dear friend Rebecca and her family, the little three and Angela, we all ate til the fill. We have a tradition that every Thanksgiving I give usher in the Christmas season by giving a special Christmas ornament to each family member. I have been doing this for years and each of my children has a special box with their collection of Christmas ornaments.

Nick decorated the bags for the ornaments with turkeys and other Thanksgiving scenes. We then use the bags as at place seating "cards"…. Nick was so clever to add a twist this year. The bags were a puzzle. If placed together in the right order, it told a of story of a turkey coming over to America with the pilgrims…trying to escape getting captured, and then jumping on another ship returning back to Europe! How clever it that!?

We capped off our family meal with a game of WHONUU?...which is great to play with little kids and grown-ups alike. Later that night jammie-clad kids and I watched Santa Clause 2.





Friday, on my Starbucks run, I saw the cutest wreath made with yarn. Knowing my yarn thing, I had to go get some red and green yarn and make my own version! A couple hours later, voila! Another way to use yarn!















Friday the kids and I spent all day cleaning the garage!

Woo-hoo! How fun!

We found things we did not know we had, took bags to the Goodwill, packed up the Thanksgiving decorations and pulled ou the Christmas ones so we can slowly decorate. After all our hard work we rewarded ourselves….

We went ICE SKATING!

Folsom has an outdoor ice skating rink from now until the end of January!. It was awesome.

IT was late enough in the day that it started to get dark not soon after we were there. The pretty Christmas lights and hot cocoa..hats and ice….fun fun.

The kids collected snowballs, they call Chunkies, after the Zamboni went through, and they are still surviving in our freezer. We laughed and played and fell and had a great time!

Thank you Lord. What a wonderful weekend with my family!














I have a great picture of Taddy, I like to call: "Death by cocoa!"






Saturday was low key, Rebecca came over to crochet..the kids got grouchy, but after dinner, all calmed down and we had a good evening and a good Sunday.

A restful and full of fun days off.