2011 Family Pictures

War

Josh Oliver's room has turned into a battlefield.

Truly, our entire house is a war zone. 

These battle scenes pop up all over the place.

Thanksgiving Football

The weather was gorgeous on Thanksgiving.

We took advantage of it and spent a lot of our time outside.

It was great!

Everything that Thanksgiving should be!

Fill Up a Bag

The highlight of Great Grandpa's house will always the candy.....and the ducks and geese!

A Girl Day

The girls didn't have school the other day, so they came over to hang out with Ollie and me.

They colored Thanksgiving pictures while I decorated the house.

It was fun.....and calm.

It's amazing what a difference it makes when the girls outnumber the boys around here.

It was nice!

Worn Out Jeans

When I switched out the boys' clothes over for the winter I was a bit depressed to see what was waiting for me.

Nearly every pair of jeans had gigantic holes in the knees.

A little hole in the knee can pass as rugged/cool, but when it's a seam-to-seam hole it just looks homely.

I don't know why I even bothered storing those jeans. 

On top of that, the few jeans that were in decent shape, no longer fit the boys.

Luke apparently went through quite the growth spurt and half of his size 8s are too short for him.  Josh Oliver has to really suck it in to get into the 5T slims, which is pretty much all of them. 

The only one who was doing alright was Henry--the boy who wears uniforms everyday.

After about a week, I got so fed up that I got rid of almost all their jeans and replaced them with nice, new, dark ones.

While I was at it, I also had to buy them all new tennis shoes and church shoes.  

Apparently, they've all had quite the growth spurts over the last few months.  (Josh jumped 3 full sizes, so I'm not exactly sure how he was even getting his old shoes on!)

It's nice to think that the boys are now set until spring, but in reality, I give them about a month or so before I start to see holes appearing again. 

Plus, Luke's shoes only made it one week before the ends of the shoelaces completely disintegrated from being walked on.

Seriously!

Seven days!

Missing Gran

Linda left for England a couple of weeks ago.

She's still got a few more before she comes back.

In the mean time, the boys have been video chatting with her to try to fill in the gap she's left behind.

We miss her!

We're counting down the days until she come back!

The Caped Crusader

Josh has been wearing his Batman costume a lot.

He's been jumping off of everything.

It makes me a little crazy, but he's pretty funny with it!

The Hotdog, the Mailbox, and the Ninja Turtle

Luke and Henry had to make their own costumes for Cub Scouts this year.

Ben was immediately excited at the thought of introducing a new generation to his favorite Halloween costume--The Halloweenie!

Luke passed on the idea of being a giant hotdog. 

Instead he wanted to make a mailbox.

He did a really awesome job on it.  He did almost all the work himself with just a little help with each step.  That, in itself, makes it great, but it really couldn't have turned out better.

We found out when it was time to trick-or-treat, though, that his design wasn't the best. 

Between the size of the box and the poster board going over his head, he couldn't actually see his hands when he had it on.  Not necessarily a problem unless you are trying to pick a piece of candy out of a candy bowl. 

After enough times of struggling to even hit the bowl with his hand, he went to having people drop candy through his mail slot, and finally he just completely ditched it altogether! 

Henry, on the other hand, went along with the whole Halloweenie idea. 

There were some concerns among us about how it would turn out.  (I didn't even consider that possibility of it looking like another type of weenie of questionable nature!)  In the end, though, Ben really pulled through! 

I'm not sure that I have ever seen a cuter hotdog! 

For his real costume, Henry was an army man.  He wears it pretty much everyday, so we convinced him to wear the Halloweenie costume over his army one for at least some of the trick-or-treating.

He had trouble running in it because it went down to about his knees. 

At one point he tripped in a driveway and couldn't get up.  None of the other kids helped him up so he had to just lay flailing and rolling on the ground until I could run up and set him upright again.

After that, he also ditched his homemade costume.

Next year, we are going to have to focus on cute AND user friendly costumes!

This year Josh Oliver decided to be a Ninja Turtle.

His costume, in no way, should be confused with his costume from last year which was a regular turtle--a.k.a. a Koopa.

Sadly, his costume from last year barely fit him so Gigi had to make a whole new costume.  On the plus side, though, I never got a good picture of him last year, so this year was sort of a two-for-one in the picture department!