A Storybook of Grace

 Hope you had a great Thanksgiving!  My dad came in for a visit from Florida.  It was a real quick visit, but nonetheless it was great to see him and to show him our forever home.  :).  I think this is the first time in a while I have enjoyed doing Thanksgiving and not stressing too much.  We did our turkey normally, but we did mashed potatoes and stuffing each in Crockpots and that helped a lot!  Sean made gravy and the rest was store bought - rolls, pies, canned green beans, and cranberry sauce.  Dad made his famous sweet tea.  Yum!  It was low fuss and so manageable to do the cooking this year.  AND it was tasty! On Friday we skipped the Christmas Parade in downtown Antioch and decided to go to dinner at a Mexican restaurant, but ended up being able to see the parade through their windows. A little gift from God.  The kids enjoyed that.   Saturday we finished decorating the house and the tree.  An 11 foot tree! ...

  Some time ago, the boys started doing most of the Lucas care - feeding him, changing his diaper, bath time, naps, bed time, getting him on and off the bus, babysitting him, getting him in and out of the van, etc.  It was super helpful because I had Natalie to take care of and because of all the emotional issues surrounding Sean and I with Lucas and him with us.  Of course, we were still parenting him and taking care of him; the boys just were just doing much of the daily tasks for him.  So, we had decided to pay the boys a good amount of money.  They were allowed to do with it as they pleased (within reason of course), and they decided to do an overnight with Sean and I and pay for a hotel room at the Great Wolf Lodge!  We were all very excited and got to go this past Friday.  How sweet of the boys, huh!?   The girls and Lucas had babysitters and Sean got off early and spent a couple of hours with them at the water park at the hotel.  I met...

https://youtu.be/SuU0K2G2MQE Natalie has realty started imitating and talking!  It’s super cute and we all love ❤️ it!    

 We’ve got leaves galore and no end to them it seems!  The beautiful gardens are gone, replaced with bare twigs and drooping leaves and we have no idea what and if we need to do anything to winterize our gardens.  But we do know we all need to get out there and rake and leaf blow, but we haven’t been able to because it gets dark so early and this weekend it’s been raining/snowing!  Our first flakes of the season!  Oh well.  Good problems to have I suppose.   Sean had Veteran’s Day off and we enjoyed a tasty lunch at Mission BBQ and nice because Sean’s was free.  He also took advantage of a free haircut at Sports Clips.  :). Friday was the last day of home school for the kiddos until 2022 so we are busy trying to come up with things for them to do to stay out of trouble and we have been getting together our Thanksgiving meal list together.  I think this year we are going to try Crockpot mashed potatoes and Crockpot stuffing.  Yesterd...

  Ryan volunteered with his Salt&Light church group this past week to help pack meals for needy families. This critter came for a visit to our back slider.   And I love these two.  This was on the train at Six Flags last Saturday.  It was super busy, but we still managed to get in some rides.  Hunter and I rode the X Flight roller coaster and it was amazing!!!  Really relieved some stress lol!!!  The one really annoying thing about Six Flags right now is we have skip the line passes, but in order to get those passes you have to stand in a line each time you go to the park to get your paper skip the line pass receipts.  So in other words, you stand in a line to then not stand in a line for a few rides.  We stood in the line in order to not stand in a line for about two hours this past time, grrrr.   The kiddos have had a cold circulating through the house for a good six weeks or more so we finally visited the doctor and now all 8 are ...

  OK, OK I promise this is the last post about Fall time around here!  Well, I may have a Halloween post, but after that I promise, that’s it.  I had been looking at my old blog this past week, A Little Peace in Our Heaven, and I was looking at all the pictures I used to post of my photography.  I used to love to do that.  I miss it.  I really enjoyed taking pictures of our kiddos and of scenery.   So last weekend we went to our downtown area and did Treat the Streets and Harvest Fest.  We love our little downtown.  They opened up all the local businesses so kids could come dressed up and get candy.  It was soooo busy down there.  I was a little surprised, but I was so glad.  At Harvest Fest, we ate lunch and watched wiener dog races.  Yes.  I said that!  They really did have races for Dachshunds only and they were funny to watch.  I don’t know how much the Dachshunds actually raced; they really just ran aro...

 We drove to McHenry last weekend to surprise Andrew on one final really late birthday thing.  He has done something related to trains every year of his life and we trying to keep up with that.  So, we took him to the Windmill Pancake Parlor, where they serve your food and beverages from a real train.  It’s pretty cool.  They had it all decorated in there for Halloween, too, so the kids really enjoyed the whole experience.  The food was good, too.  I felt bad because there was only one server for the whole restaurant, but he managed to do a really good job still.   We had gone there after a church Western Bonanza thing, but it was too early to eat an early dinner so we took the kids to a coffee shop with us, which was interesting and somewhat of a fail when Jessica and Hailey were playing on a really old typewriter that was just for decoration and the store worker came over and snatched it up and carried it away after mumbling that they were not a...