Thankful I Wasn't On the Mayflower!

First, I'd like to begin this thankful post by saying I am truly thankful I was not on the Mayflower voyage to the new world, thankful not to be among those pilgrims that first Thanksgiving. We watched a movie with our kids recently on the pilgrims and if that animated video was even 10% accurate in depicting what life was like on that boat for months and then the first few months in the new world, it was rough, y'all! And cold and there was no food and everybody was dying, and on that boat? Seasickness and close quarters and nothing to do for weeks and weeks that turned into months! Eye-opening, that little Charlie Brown cartoon was!

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We put up our Christmas tree this weekend, and I love that my children have NO CONCEPT of spreading out the ornaments! Even when I started laughing about a particularly crammed section of the tree and got out my camera to document it, they were looking at me like, "What?" They had no clue why it was funny to me to see about 30 ornaments in a 6 inch section of the tree!


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A family trip to Target, buying and wrapping gifts for children who may not otherwise get gifts this Christmas. Such a blessing!

Every year after Thanksgiving our church takes a week and for about 4 different nights we send buses to low-income apartment complexes all over our city and pick up bus-loads of people, bring them to our church where they are served a hot meal complete with dessert by our church members, entertained with a spectacular Christmas show, delivered the Gospel message, prayed with, invited to come back to our church any Sunday, and then when they board the bus to go home they are greeted with bags full of groceries for everyone and toys for every child, geared for their specific age! It is a great ministry and a blessing to be a part of!

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These babies arrived in the mail today! What are they? Well, plastic molded flowers to be exact. But really? Pure happiness is what they are! What am I going to do with them? Well, what couldn't you do with them? I've already made 2 rings, one for me and one for my daughter, just glued them onto a blank ring (that you can buy for less than $1.00 on Etsy.com). Want some of this happiness for yourself? Here's where I got mine.


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My kids and I made little paper cities today. Printed them from here.


Oh so fun! Although there was some frustration when the cities kept falling over (my kids haven't mastered the art of a delicate hand, yet), so we taped them to the floor!

I was busy cutting out the 22nd or 23rd little .5 inch person

and looked up to see my 3 year old getting a little crazy with the tape!



Notice in this picture 15 minutes later he's still sportin' the tape head. Yeah, he thought it was hilarious and wanted to show Daddy when Daddy got home from work. Big Brother was happy to do the honors of pulling the tape out at the end of the night. Thankfully my 3 year old is tough and didn't yell at all about all his hair being ripped out!
All three of my kids playing together with smiles for hours over toys that cost us nothing, except some paper and printer ink?

More than priceless!

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