Elf Yourself

If you haven't tried out THIS website, it's hilarious. Here's one Susannah made with Abraham, myself, Adam and her. Abraham's elf is outrageous. We died laughing!

Bark

The other day, one of my students, Marty, brought in this bark she had taken from a tree they'd found at her aunt's house over Thanksgiving.

Her mom helped her bring it in; it was pretty fragile and was just falling off the tree. You may think it's not that special until you take a closer look . . .

The whole piece was covered with imprints of different insects and creepy crawlies. It was so cool! Her mom said all of the bark was like that!

This is just a picture I had to take of Paige! So cute!

Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving we were so excited to have our family come and spend time with us. It was nice to be at home.

The night before, we stopped by the store for some essentials.

We ate our actual Thanksgiving Dinner at the Call's house hosted by Uncle Darrell and Aunt Maylene. They live just a couple of miles away.

My dad made good use of the tomatoes he brought from his garden.

Not to be outdone, Adam, AKA the Giant, added carrots for a more dazzling effect.

My mom and I enjoyed some after dinner pie.

My dad liked the carrot idea.

Here's a random shot later that night as we gathered for games at my house.

Apparently I wasn't informed about the gray sweatshirt club.

We played games and had cheese fondue! Yum!

The next day we solicited some help in our Christmas preparations. Susannah and my mom sawed off the bottom of the tree so it owuld be perfectly flat. We don't want any of the drama we've had the last 2-3 years with our Christmas trees. Don't ask!

We enlisted the giant in Christmas light duty. The ladder wasn't tall enough to reach the top of the house, so Adam climbed on top of the porch cover and then onto the roof.

He went over the the front and started putting on the clips. He installed satellite dishes this summer and is pretty comfortable on a roof. This, however, was the worst roof he's been on. Too steep!

After he got the clips on, we didn't send him back up with the lights. Abraham tried later that night, but it was way too dangerous. We're looking for an alternative. Negative number one about having a tall house!

Navajo Tacos

Being from Northern Arizona, you can imagine that I would be a big fan of Navajo Tacos. Even if you wouldn't imagine it, it's true.
As part of our Native American unit at school, I had my kids make fry bread. I shared some with my teammates and they were big fans. I decided to have them over for a fry bread extravaganza!

Here they are loading up their fry bread with all the fixins! It was a fun time. Thanks to Susannah for helping me with everything!

Painting!

I've been dying to post about our upstairs painting endeavors of a couple of weeks ago! We decided we wanted to surprise our parents with it since they were coming for Thanksgiving. I couldn't post it, because my mom is one of my most regular blog readers. I have been informed that my parents are currently driving here, so I can post it now!

We started on a Friday evening. Abraham really helped out a lot for a few hours.

Jen is a super fast roller. She helped out tons!

Susannah painted the brown accent wall herself! It's super scary painting there because it's so high and is on the landing of the stairs. There's not a ton of room and the ladder is at a very steep angle!

I finished off the blue Saturday morning. I had to run and get more paint in order to finish it off.

I taped off and painted the stripe and word box. It took me almost an hour! It's still a little lower on one side than the other! Shhh!

Susannah applied the wall stickers after the paint had dried and the tape was removed.

Several days later, we added some embellishments.

Here's what we've got as of now. We're still hunting for some good frames and more pictures to put up. We love it. What do you think?

Thanksgiving Program

Our first graders had a Thanksgiving performance on Monday night.

Here's my class (minus one who came late) in their shirts and headbands for the performance. This was the day before the show.

One of my teammate's dads is very handy. He built us this Tepee frame out of PVC pipe. It takes a while to assemble, but it looks great.

My class also made paper mache turkeys to help decorate for the program. They're really cute!

Here are the kiddos singing during the performance Monday night.

Since it was a Monday night activity, we combined it with our Bushman Funhouse FHE and invited everyone to the performance. Here Susannah, Jen, and Bradford (in the back) arrive.

Adam and Abraham were among the others that came.

The FHE friends came over after for some treats and the shenanigans began. Susannah and I somehow ended up with red marks on our face from Adam's pen. Weird!

Susannah's phone was missing after everyone left. We heard it ringing and it took us awhile to find it. It was stuffed inside a bell pepper! How nice of Abraham to wrap it in a paper towel so it wouldn't be damaged.

Steamroll

Here's the video I've been waiting for! I decided not to stick it in sequence after all because it would already be on the second page! Yikes!

This was at our camp out. Adam and Abraham were sleeping out under the stars. We were in a tent. When we tried to leave our tent, Susannah found that it had been tied shut with fishing line. We obviously thought it was those two jokers so Susannah decided to wake them up with a nice steamroll. It turns out that it wasn't them who pranked our tent, but they deserved a good steamroll anyway!