Thanksgiving

We hosted Thanksgiving down here in Arizona this year, and it was really the first time that we have ever had a big family gathering at our house (not just in AZ, but anywhere). Most everyone got there late Wednesday night. Katie and Gordon couldn't come until Friday because they were in Tucson with Gordon's sister, so we decided to have Thanksgiving on Friday. I really loved having a friday thanksgiving. On Thursday we all just chilled out and Amber made homemade pizza and breadsticks for dinner, plus we pre-made a lot of food for the next day. It was nice to have a lot of help with the preparation, especially with the pie-making. Then Thursday we went to the park to play while waiting for food to cook and ate and played games. Saturday we sortof chilled out again and we played rubber-band war. That is a game we used to play with my dad as kids where we'd set up army men in forts of styrofoam and after we're all set up we shoot rubber bands and catapult dog food (we used cocoa puffs though), and at the end whoever has the most army guys still standing is the winner. At night we had a birthday party for Abigail and Annika, and everyone left on Sunday.
It was so much fun to have everyone there. We had 14 kids (all 9 and under) and 13 adults over for thanksgiving dinner, and we were able to all eat in the house. Gordon's cousin Lisa, who lives here in Sierra Vista, and her 4 kids had joined us for all of Friday's activities. The girls really enjoyed having all of their cousins over. They all ended up having a big slumber party in Lyla and Mckayla's room. 8 little girls together in a room and they did all go to sleep each night (eventually). Also, Hannah joined us on Saturday. She had been in Mexico and Amber went to get her in Tucson where the bus had dropped her off. 7 of the 9 siblings were here and we all fit okay!
Here are some pictures of the kids making styrofoam forts for the rubber band war.

The guys decided to be manly and take a dip or two in the pool. Becca and Angela got in too. The water was cold!!!! Though our days are still pretty warm, it gets really cold at night and it isn't warm enough to heat the pool to a comfortable swimming temperature.

Several people also enjoyed the Turkey bowl on Friday at the park as well. That was the part Jake had really been looking forward to. They played pretty hard, so that most of them were complaining about being sore on Saturday.

I couldn't find my camera for much of the weekend, and have been begging for pictures from my sisters and mom who were constantly taking pictures. When I do get those pics I'll post 'em, but this is it for Thanksgiving pictures for now.

Pre-Thanksgiving

I am still trying to catch up on all of the November posts I had been meaning to write, but I am nearing the end of November. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Mckayla's class decided to do a Thanksgiving dinner with their 3rd grade buddy class. Only they were going to have to make a lot of the Thanksgiving dinner themselves. The class was split up into groups and each group made something. One group made cornbread, one made fruit salad, one made stuffing, one made pumpkin pie in a cup desserts (which were totally awesome), and our group made mashed potatos. We had to cut them and boil them and mash them. Once everything was cooking the kids paired off and went outside to make butter. I had never seen that before. But they just put heavy cream in a jar and the kids took turns with their buddies shaking the heck out of the jars until it clumped into butter. It could've used some salt, but otherwise it tasted great. The dinner was really good and we had some leftovers even though most of the unoccupied staff at the school came and joined in the eating. Below is Mckayla eating:

This is the spread of food they had, and Mckayla getting her plate filled.

This is a butter-shaking shot of Mckayla outside.

I really enjoy getting to go help out in the girls' classrooms. I like meeting their friends from school and talking with their teachers. I feel like it is important for me to be involved at the school so I know what is going on and how things are done there. It makes me feel like I am part of their education even though I am just sending them off to school.

Our School Carnival

Back in mid-November I helped put on a fall carnival for the girls' elementary school. I have been trying to get involved in the PTSO, and this was my first big event. I was put in charge of putting on all of the games. It turned out pretty fun, but it was a lot of work. We had 14 different activities for kids to do, and all came with prizes to win and such, so it was an ordeal to get together. Once things got going everything turned out pretty well. The High School ROTC group supplied volunteers to run all of the games and they were really great with the kids. I was a bit surprised to find out the day of that I would be the one responsible for 30 teenagers for the entire day. I thought they might have had some chaperones coming with them, but that wasn't the case. They were good though as long as we were busy. I only had a few trouble makers to deal with. Below is my girls running the relay race:

This is the "Electric Slide" (cake-walk) it was easily the most popular game around because we were giving out king size candy to the winners of the game.

This was the dinosaur dig game. It was very messy, but a lot of the kids really liked it. Jaxon kept going back to it to throw sand around.

This is just a snapshot of some of the other games we put on.

Jake was able to convince the people at his work to let him bring a display for the kids to look at, and he got the army unit to drive a humvee over for kids to crawl in and out of. That turned out really well for everyone. The kids really liked the humvee and the adults were really interested in the UAV display. Jake always had a crowd of adults around him asking questions. He brought a 3rd-scale UAV, which is just a smaller one that they use for training before flying with the real deal. It was awesome that he was able to do that. Below is Jake's display and a kid of a friend of ours who came to help him set up.

We also had a big craft fair with over 30 vendors, a silent auction, and we served pizza and drinks for lunch. The craft fair and the auction were for fund-raising, and we didn't charge for games or prizes and only charged enough to break even on the pizza. It turned out to be a pretty successful event where we were able to raise a good deal of money for the school, plus provide some fun activities for people to do. I am enjoying the PTSO, but I think it is sad that so few people are involved in it. At my first meeting there were only 10 parents, and there are 500 students at the school. They were excited that we had such a huge turnout. yeah.

Jaxon's not-so-new Trick

Jaxon has been walking for a few months, but I realized that I hadn't said anything when I was talking to a friend and she asked, "is that kid moving yet or what?" He really took steps here and there starting at 11 months or so, but he wasn't that interested because he was such a fast crawler. I am not sure what made him want to try it out, but it seems like he just took off one day. He has only been walking well since mid October or so, I can't pin it down to a particular day. He hasn't stopped since.

A Couple of Random Pics

Lyla has been trying diligently to learn to blow bubbles with bubblegum and has finally succeeded. She also has worked hard on snapping her fingers and is currently working on learning to tie shoes. I am not sure why she gets so caught up on wanting to learn little things like that. If only she wanted to work diligently on learning to read....
PS. please excuse the bags of trash in the background. We always wait until the night before trash day to collect all of the trash and get it out of the house, and that is evidently what we were in the middle of when I snapped this picture.
I don't really remember what we were doing that made Jake and the girls so tired but they ended up all falling asleep on the couch together and I thought it was really cute so I snapped a picture. I think they had snuggled up to watch a movie or something and ended up conked out.

Here is proof that I actually canned for the first time ever, and these are most of the things I canned. I did mild and hot salsa, and pomegranate jelly and juice. We'll see if I am ever able to expand my canning efforts.

I have had a few requests for pictures of my new bling... so here ya go! I love it a lot. I tried to get a non-blurry good picutre, but I am not much of a photographer obviously. But it is still an awesome ring and a really great surprise from Jake.

An Adventure with Ivan

A really good friend of ours, Ivan Marshall, came to visit back in October. He was one of Jake's groomsmen and has visited us several times. On his last day Jake had to works and we were trying to find something to do. I looked up somethings on the internet and we decided we'd go try and find a ghost town to explore. There are several of them around here, most are within 20-30 minutes of sierra vista. The San Pedro river used to be a busy trade route, but over-irrigation has turned it into a small creek and it hasn't been used as a trade route for a very long time. There are several ghost towns along ther river. Also there are a number of old mining communities that were shut down 100 years ago and are now ghost towns. Anyways, we set out to find Charleston, AZ. We drove to the river (only about 10 minutes from town) and tried to find a trail to follow. We learned that most of these towns aren't touristy ghost towns that are easily found, we tried to take our best guess at where we thought it would be based on the crude maps that we saw on the internet. After awhile of sloshing through the river we went up and started treking, but it was hard going and I had Jaxon strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. I wasn't expecting it to be as much of a hike as it was. The brush and growth was very thick and thorny so we had to give up. I just had capris on, because I really was expecting there to be some sort of trail or something, so both Ivan and I had cuts all over our legs. We headed back and just let Jaxon go crazy in the river crawling around and I snapped a few photos. I did some more research at home and just for curiosity sake looked it up on google maps. If you look at the satelite imagery part of it you can see some ruins of buildings, they are about a mile or so away from where google says the town is supposed to be, but it is the only thing that looks town like in the area. I plan to go back sometime with Jake to see if we can find it again.

This is a link to the google map of it: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=charleston,+az&ll=31.635735,-110.176365&spn=0.002727,0.004726&t=h&z=18&iwloc=addr

Jake's Flying Lessons

A guy that Jake works with is a flight instructor and has opened a business teaching flying lessons on the side. Jake has been wanting to get his pilot's license for a long time. We really look at it as an investment because it makes him more valuable and versatile to his company. It also makes it easier for him to get positions working on other aircraft. So we knew this was something we wanted to do. He started a few weeks ago and has been doing great so far. We went out last Saturday to watch him fly. It was fun, but the girls were really disappointed that they didn't get to ride in the plane. I am not so disappointed because he is training on a light-weight aircraft that gets tossed around in the slightest wind. I am already a white-knuckled flier on big jets and I don't know if I could handle one of those things. He is doing realy well, on his third flight he did the entire take-off without any intervention from the instructor. Flying is something that seems to come very easily to Jake, so it makes sense for us to continue to have him develope those skills. I am happy for him and proud of how good he is doing. I just thought I'd show him off a little bit.