Happy Thanksgiving!!!

I posted these pictures while standing in line for over an hour at Dick's to get Michael's shoes for Christmas! What a crazy night of shopping, I had a blast and it was so great to go with my friend Nicole! I don't think I've ever shopped continuously for 13 hours ever before but it was worth it! 

Megan had her annual eye exam and the doctor told her she needs glasses. She is super excited about it so that's a plus! Here is a picture of the ones she picked out!

Jacob's exam is in January when the vision insurance kicks in (that's also when Megan's glasses will be ordered). Michael and I also had eye exams and we had it all planned out to switch the kids over and go home but we weren't expecting Megan's appointment to take so long! Jacob and Emily were troopers and I'm sure when we left the staff all had a sigh of relief! Jacob really wanted to try glasses on too so he had fun trying girl glasses on. He will most likely need glasses in January as well so we will be a glasses family soon!

Mom's boss gave her a giftcard to Applebees for doing a great job! Here is a picture from the night! It started out great but then after an hour and a half the kids lost it!

Thanksgiving was a nice relaxing day with lots of time to enjoy the kids! We got the Lego's out and all three had fun! Emily does a great job with the little lego's!

Ahhh, the calm before the storm picture! The good: Jacob had fun building random things with the Lego's. The bad: He didn't pick up the Lego's (I told him before he dumped them out he would have to put them away). The ugly: He refused to pick them up so his Lego's are permanently removed from the house and he's no longer able to play with Megan's Lego's. Hopefully he learned something from this but he didn't seem to care...

Megan didn't want to build on her own at first but after we refused to get involved she finally let her imagination go and she turned her beauty shop Lego set into a flying hotel!

My friend Nicole and her kids John and Allie came over for dinner and we planned our Black Friday shopping fun. The kids had a great time, especially John and Jacob because they had major boy wrestling fun, Jacob got a little beat up but loved every minute! I hope to add another picture of the kids all eating dinner together smiling from ear to ear! This picture was taken by Megan who swiped my phone, I didn't even know these pictures were on there until uploading to the blog!

Our little gymnast and random pictures!

Megan had her first showcase for gymnastics this weekend and had a blast. She was patient as it lasted over 2 hours! Here she is on the podium getting her award! She's hooked now more than ever!

Emily is quite the dare devil! She took a break from the slide and this is where we found her...she made it all the way to the top. Needless to say I was beyond nervous!

She made it...I hope she never wants to do that again :)

Jacob has been pretending to be a dog lately and here he is laying down with Shoney!

Emily is making a line with the letters! She is talking so much now it's amazing! It's so cute when she says baby, mama, more, bye-bye! She's also imitating everything these days. At church she was trying to sing which was sweet! She's also little miss independent wanting to do everything herself which is usually a good thing (except when she will not hold my hand to walk so then she gets picked up and screams like no other!)

Marathon Man!!!

Michael ran his first marathon on Saturday!! He has trained for 16 weeks straight without ever missing a workout! He did an amazing job and it was great to see all of his hard work pay off! His goal was to complete it under 4 hours 15 minutes and he accomplished that by doing 4 hours 7 minutes! We had a great time in Kansas City and couldn't have done it without my mom (who had Megan and Emily), Laura and Jon (who had Jacob), and my coworker Sarah (who had Shoney). Laura and Jon even made the trip with Jacob so they could see Michael finish!  I managed to chase Michael through Kansas City to finally catch up with him two times...I missed him by minutes two other times (I'm still a little miffed about that!). I personally learned a lot about being a spectator and will put it all to use when Michael runs his next marathon (possibly in April/May).

http://www.thenorthface.com/en_US/endurance-challenge/kansas-city-mo-road/results/?stop_mobi=yes

Here we are before the race!

I borrowed this image from the race website!

Another borrowed picture!

I managed to take this one myself! Michael wasn't supposed to be with the 4 hour pacers so I wasn't looking for him and I was distracted by 2 little boys running the half marathon that I almost missed Michael completely!

Wahoooo! He finished the race!!!

Here are his official times!

Jacob waiting for his daddy to finish!

Random Fun

Random pictures from the week so far!

Megan seems to think she likes Barbie's now...I hope it's not just a quickly passing fad with her!

She's the one in the blue doing her warm up stretches! She continues to enjoy gymnastics and we bit the bullet and signed both kids up for the next session. We weren't planning to sign Jacob up but he moved up a level so we felt we needed to go ahead and sign him up too...and they both love it of course!

Ahhh, the look on Shoney's face during our "Polite" Tea Party at school! The kids absolutely loved seeing her be dressed up and us be silly with a pretend tea party with Clifford and other friends!

Jacob is growing up way too fast! We had his parent-teacher conference and the teachers said he's doing great, he counts to 11 or 12, knows 5+ shapes, knows most colors but struggles with green (asking the doctor in January when he goes for his vision test because he is solid with all others besides green and brown!) In this picture he can wrote his name! 

At the pet store Megan was testing out the full grown gecko leopard! We are trying to get her interested in anything but a turtle! She loves the turtle but it requires so much that we'd rather not get into it!

Karen's Wedding!!!

This past weekend we had an amazing time at Michael's cousin Karen's wedding in St. Louis. The wedding was absolutely perfect and Karen thought of everything! We left Emily and Jacob with my mom and Shoney with my friend/coworker Sarah.  Megan came with us and had a blast with her cousin Jessi.  Jessi stayed with us the night of the wedding and the kids were super excited to get some serious girl time together!

Megan finally agreed to a picture by the pretty flowers!

The girls all dolled up for the wedding!

Megan and Jessi really enjoyed dancing the night away! Megan was a little nervous at first and told me she didn't want to dance because someone in kindergarten told her she couldn't dance...I put my own issues aside and got out there on the dance floor with Megan, then she loved it and let loose!

More fun dancing!

She even managed to get Michael out on the dance floor!

OK, so the real fun began at the dinner table! Michael's brother Matt is a jokester and teased the wait staff all night, he managed to have an imaginary friend named SamWeeda that also received food and drink. Adam really got into it with him too.  Needless to say there was an open bar as well which made the night even funnier! For some reason Matt decided it would be funny to put a rose petal on his forehead and talked Adam into putting it on there too...then the girls wanted to do it...then other kids wanted to do it...it was hilarious! After a while though Matt needed a way out of this so the kids then went "undercover" with the rose petals hidden under their sleeves! The memories made this night the kids will have forever, it was great!

The original two!

The girls think they are in the club too!

I think we ended up with around 6 kids with petals on their forehead!

Family picture of the three of us!

Uncle Jon and Aunt Laura!

Megan really enjoyed the awesome pool. It was a heated indoor pool that also had an outdoor portion. Megan was in heaven! She was able to swim 2 times while we were in town and loved every minute!

Michael was so impressed with Megan's skills he nodded off for a while...he'd really like me to delete this picture but it's just so good that I just can't do it!

OK so we did a very poor job of taking pictures of the bride and groom, this is the only one that sort of turned out, I'm looking forward to her professional pictures because the photographer looked like he was taking some great shots!

Friday night we had a pizza party at Sue's house because Matt was in town.  The kids had a blast and Jacob laughed the night away. They really liked teasing Uncle Matt and they managed to put balloons in his boots, Jacob pretended he was a "bad guy" to beat up, and Emily ended up with his hat! 

Happy Halloween!!!

We had a great Halloween! The kids were great and we really enjoyed ourselves.

Group picture before the fun began.

I like this picture better because they look really happy!

Jacob is really into super heroes and he had a blast as Captain America!

Michael tried on the teenage mutant ninja turtle mask and the kids giggled like crazy!

I am Captain America! The shield was purchased and used several weeks before Halloween...he loved throwing it around our garage and breaking it in, to the shield certainly looked like it had seen a battle or two!

Megan wanted to be a baby turtle and she loved it! She is obsessed with turtles right now and really wants one for Christmas...I'm not too sure about a turtle in our house but we'll see! The turtle costume was a teenage mutant ninja turtle costume minus the ninja part!

Emily was originally going to be Roo but she was way too big so instead she used the 3t cow costume and was adorable. She was say moo and everyone loved her!

I'm cute and I know it!

Pumpkin patch!!!

We made our yearly trip to the Pumpkin Patch this past weekend and the kids absolutely loved it! The usual fun with the hay maze, corn digging, pumpkin picking, animal petting, and more! We usually go to Central Diary Ice Cream afterwards but apparently they close at 6pm and we pulled into the parking lot at 6pm...bummer...note to self make sure to get there before 6pm next year!

Jacob enjoyed trying to bury Emily...she wasn't too sure about this!

Hahahahaha I've buried my sister!

The entrance to the hay maze was through the hay bales, Emily barely fit but had no fear about charging on through to the unknown!

On our way to get the pumpkins!

I'm the farmer!

This giant chair was a new addition this year! The kids really enjoyed it and I love the picture!

Picture from inside the teepee!

Another cute picture without the hats this time!

Cheese!

Emily loved wandering around the pumpkin patch. She wants to be so independent these days. She didn't want to be held or hold a hand and as a result she tripped into rotten pumpkin more than once...so by the end of the outing she was covered in pumpkin goo!

Mommy and Jacob on the tractor ride!

Megan posing in the pumpkin patch! She was determined to find the absolute perfect pumpkin and we think she might have looked at every pumpkin in the patch...but in the end she did find a good looking pumpkin!

Enjoying the hay maze!

Emily enjoyed climbing on the sides of the giant chair too!

I found one!

Squeeze...I shouldn't have eaten so much yogurt this morning :)

Jacob also enjoyed searching for pumpkins but he really liked the hay ride and also loved pulling the wagon around.  

He wasn't too sure about the hay maze but after Emily went in he got his courage up to follow!