Thanksgiving Weekend

What a wonderful holiday weekend! Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays....actually, it runs a pretty close race with Christmas.

We started off the holiday weekend by taking a family portrait with all of Daniel's family. The last family picture was before there were any significant others and kids so it was really neat to get to make an updated pic! Chris and Hannah were in from California and Joel, Sarah, and Jackson were down from Arkansas so it was the perfect time to get together. It was a pretty hot, crowded place when you put in 20 adults and 4 babies, but I think it actually turned out pretty well!
We also took the opportunity to take a picture of our little fam...Miss K was giving her new, closed mouth grin!

I absolutely love the two pictures we took of Kenna by herself...the problem is that I can't decide which one I like better!

Some of you will probably see these pictures again soon... :)

Thanksgiving day, we spent the day with the Boyds. It was wonderful to get to celebrate the holiday in their new home! The boys played football (real, tackle football, but without any pads) while all of the womenfolk were in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on the meal. I love how we put all the table together so that everyone can sit together. It is a wonderful way to fellowship. Someday in the future we will have to have a kids table, though.

The kids had a great time playing together. Luke, JD, and Kenna were having a blast together. It won't be long before Jackson will be joining in.

Mercy and Grandpa helping to entertain the babies.

Kenna especially enjoyed the hardwood floors. We would make her a spot on the rug or on a blanket and she would immediately move over to the floor. She figured out how to slide along the floor with minimal effort. She could get to wherever she wanted to go pretty quickly. My favorite was when she decided to use her belly as a pivot and started turning herself in circles. It was too funny!

Friday, the whole gang came over to watch the Arkansas/LSU game, which was quite exciting.

My sister and her family and my parents got into town on Friday night. The ladies left the babies with the guys on Saturday and went to do some Christmas shopping in Canton. We had a blast! It was crowded because of being a holiday weekend before Christmas, but we were there from open to close (well, 30 minutes before close) and would have stayed a lot longer if they would have let us! I knocked out a lot of my Christmas shopping this weekend! I think the guys had fun just hanging out at home, playing with the babies. For some reason, they really weren't excited about joining us in Canton. :)

We took some great pictures of Abbye and Kenna together in front of the tree. They were all decked out in their Christmas overalls, but I just realized that all of my secret santa presents for work are wrapped under the tree! It would be really easy for everyone else to figure out who has who if they were to see the pics. I will post them next week after we have our office Christmas party....

Hope everyone else had a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday! Now the countdown to Christmas is officially on!

Watching the 'Boys with the boys

On Sunday, Kenna got to hang out with some more of her Uncles and watch the Cowboys game. She thought it was great fun to hang out with Daddy and his brothers on the couch. She just made herself comfortable! Josh got a little excited once and Kenna had to see what was going on.

Smiling for the camera!

Taking a break during halftime to play on the tile floor...and smile at the camera! (I love how the front of her shirt gets pulled down by her belly when she crawls. Once she makes her way over to the tile, it stays there!)

Firsts

Kenna has had a few days of "firsts."

She has never been interested in holding her own bottle, but Thursday night, she thought she might give it a try. This lasted for a whole five minutes before she decided to play with it instead. Of course, the next time I fed her, she was back to her normal routine of throwing her arms back and letting Mom/Dad feed her. I'm sure she will decide she wants to hold it on her own someday!!

Kenna also officially had her first injury on Thursday night. I guess she thought that coffee tables would move out of your way if you hit them hard enough. :) She is army crawling all over our living room and has decided that she really likes to pat her hands on the tile floor of the kitchen. (It makes a really neat noise). She was working her toward the tile at the back door and had a head-on collision with the leg of the coffee table. She only cried for a few seconds before she was back to smiling. As of today, she only has a small yellow color on her forehead. I'm sure this is the first of many more to come.

Kenna has also learned how to smile at the camera. All you have to do is pull it out and she forgets anything else she has been doing so that she can grin.

Because our next few weeks are pretty busy, we decided (well, maybe I decided, but Daniel helped) that we would go ahead and decorate for Christmas. I am usually very opposed to decorating before Thanksgiving, but I wasn't sure when else we would do it and I wanted Kenna to be able to enjoy looking at the tree. She loves the lights!

Kenna had a lot of fun playing while we were decorating....Deja vu?

My brother, Cade, and his girlfriend, Kyla, came over this evening. They are in town to go to the Cowboy's game tomorrow and had dinner with me and Miss K. Kenna LOVES her Uncle Cade. She just played and played while sitting in his lap.

She even let him make funny faces...

She also got to love on Kyla. She had the best time with our visitors. She even stayed up an hour later just so she could play!

I am loving watching Kenna grow and develop more and more of her own personality. I may be a little biased, but I think she is just precious!!

Kenna and the Exersaucer

I am sorry I have been a bad blogger recently... too much time out of town!

We made a quick trip to Arkansas this week to celebrate the life of Daniel's grandmother. Mamaw passed away Saturday morning. I was extremely blessed to get to know this wonderful lady and I can only hope that the memories people have of me someday will be as nice as what was being said about Mamaw.

Kenna did great on the trip and actually slept all but 45 min of the four and a half hour car trip.

When we did get home, she was more than ready to play. She jumped and jumped in her jumper before spending some time in the exersaucer. Eventually we moved her to the floor so she could crawl around a bit. I guess she wanted back in the exersaucer! She got a little frustrated that she could not get her legs over into the bowl and was waiting for me to quit taking pictures and rescue her.

Miss K LOVES the bathtub and took a little break from playing to smile at her daddy. Even though she is sitting up really well, we still put her in the bathseat because she gets so excited about being in the water. When Kenna gets excited, it is full body excitement and she bounces and kicks and waves her arms. It is too much fun to watch!

I promise I will try to do better about posting Kenna pics!

Sleepover with JD

Saturday night, JD spent the night at our house so Jon and Mandy could go to the Wilderness Trek dinner. We decided that Mandy would spend too much time on the road if she dropped him off, drove to the dinner, drove back up to our house, and then home. We thought that having a sleepover would be a little easier on everyone.

JD and Miss K had sooo much fun together. They played and played on Saturday night. Sunday morning, Kenna Beth woke everyone up early (right after 6), so JD and I had a little snuggle time on the couch while I looked for some Wiggles on TV.

Once everyone had breakfast, JD and Kenna were ready to play again. Mandy had brought some new toys for JD to play and he has so much fun riding his plane around our living room/kitchen. Once he had made a few circuits, he decided to share with Miss K. She had fun riding (as long as her daddy was holding her on). JD pushed and pushed.Once JD noticed that Daniel had been holding onto Miss K, he decided he needed to help out his little cousin as well.
Another one of the toys that Mandy sent, was a ball popper (I am sure it has a more technical name, but....). Both kids had a blast with the popper. JD would chase the balls around that flew off of the track while Kenna just waved and waved her arms. It was so much fun to watch. (In this picture, JD was still on his plane)

Kenna had to investigate a little more and wanted to see how the balls were popping into the air.
I would say that the evening was very successful and we cannot wait to do it again. Once both of the kids have grown a little older, I am sure that we will be doing this a LOT. Next time we will have to invite Luke and Jackson!

Kauai - The Garden Island

Daniel and I were lucky enough to get to go on a wonderful vacation to Hawaii. We went with Jon and Mandy and Jeremy and Lindsey and had a blast!! We all left our kids at home (the first time for all of us) and spent some time in beautiful Kauai.

Kauai is known as the garden island and it definitely lives up to its name. It rains for a little while almost everyday so everything is nice and green.

We started off worrying about Jon and Mandy. We thought they were supposed to be on our flight to LA and we were convinced they had missed the flight when in reality they were on a plane that left one hour later. No worries, though, we all met up in LA and took a very LONG flight over the ocean. (What a flight!!)

When we arrived at the hotel, we were greeted with beautiful leis...I was already in heaven!!

The next morning we watched a gorgeous sunrise from our lanai (that is the Hawaiian word for patio...haha). Our internal clocks were a little off since Hawaii was 5 hours behind our normal Central Time, but we were always up in time to watch the sun make an appearance. What a great way to start the day!!

Our own private patio...This is what we looked at when we looked toward the hotel from our patio.

The first day was quite rainy and rained almost all day. It usually rains everyday, but only for 45 minutes or so, and it is not the heavy rains that we are used to. We decided to take advantage of the time and drive up to Waimea Canyon and then spend some time shopping for souvenirs...fun, fun!

The next day I spent the whole day at the pool. The Hyatt actually has three pools, two regular pools and a saltwater lagoon. The girls loved spending time with our books while the guys went back and forth between the ocean and whatever pool we had staked out. Daniel and Jon got to go scuba diving that morning and LOVED it! We heard a lot of stories about the octopus that they had on their heads....too bad we do not have pictures of that!

This is a picture of one of the regular pools.......and this is a picture of the saltwater lagoon. They had a 'beach' with chairs and the water was around 10 feet deep in the middle.

You could also take kayaks out into the lagoon. Lindsey and I kept knocking the boys out of their kayak. Go girls!We all got dressed up for dinner and went to Tidepools, a restaurant at the Hyatt. Our table was right out in the pond at the hotel so we got to watch the koi during dinner. I loved all the fresh fish and fruit.

Tidepool's version of a candlelight dinner. The next day we went on our rafting expedition of the Napali coast. (This is a borrowed picture...we did not take it and I will soon tell you why...the rest of the pictures are ours). The Napali coast is a portion of the Kauai coast line that is only accessible by boat or helicopter. This gorgeous part of Earth has been used as the backdrop for many movies including Jurassic Park, King Kong (with Jessica Lange), and was also the fictional island in South Pacific.

We had booked a rafting expedition to view the coastline first hand. I don't think any of us really knew what we were getting in to. Lindsey and Jeremy decided to take the catamaran cruise while we did the rafting version. When we got to the boat, we were all surprised to find that there were not any seats to sit in. We had to balance on the side of the raft sitting sidesaddle and holding on to the ropes on the side. I know that Mandy and I at least were holding on for dear life! It was really a neat way to see the coast but we were bounced around like crazy as we went over all of the ocean swells. Our captain, Matt, would stop to show us the scenes, and we were able to take pictures then, but we did not get too many pictures while we were in the middle of the ocean...I was too busy holding on!

This is a picture of our "boat" that held 15 people.

We did get to stop and play with some spinner dolphins. Apparently, these dolphins love to socialize!Our first glimpse of the Napali Coast. (look at the ocean!)There are several waterfalls that begin from freshwater springs on the island that then flow into the ocean.We made a beach landing and were able to see some ruins from an ancient Hawaiian village. We were also able to see 4 large sea turtles. I was surprised at how big they were!

We also spent some time snorkeling off of the beach.

Fortunately, we all survived! We did have to stop and wait for a little while at the order of the US military. The Pacific Missile Range is located along one of the Kauai beaches and we were ordered to stop and wait for a test launch. Even though we were just sitting in the boat for about 20 minutes, it was really neat to see the missile go off.

I had a really good time and a lot of fun, but, I think next time we will join Jeremy and Lindsey on their bigger boat!!

The next day, the boys rented some boogie boards and spent some time in the ocean by the hotel while the girls hung out by the pools. They were able to really enjoy the sunshine and caught some pretty good waves. I even tried it a few times!

That night we went to the luau at the hotel. We were fairly disappointed because they moved it inside due to the possibility of rain. I think we all thought they were crazy at first because the sun was shining, but we were very glad to be indoors when the skies opened up and the rain came down. The luau was still quite impressive, full of hula dancing and fire twirling.

I guess I will have to go back so I can go to an outdoor luau!! :)

The last day we were there, we drove up to the North Shore area before heading to the airport.

It was an amazing trip, and, although I missed my baby girl, we had a blast! It was very nice to spend time with my husband and friends. We certainly enjoyed our time there.

Kenna had a lot of fun with her grandparents in Muleshoe and I have plenty of pictures from her adventures with Mimzi and Pa that I will share soon.

Aloha!!