Thanksgiving Week

Happy late Thanksgiving!

You may have noticed that I took advantage of Thanksgiving break to create an updated header for the blog (finally, now that Landon is no longer 7 months old!) And I added the plus sign after his name so that our baby girl gets represented as well!!

We were busy traveling all over the place this past week, which left blogging at low priority. We left the Friday before Thanksgiving to head to Arkansas for a wedding that Kyle was in, but we dropped Landon off at my parents' house on our way to the rehearsal Friday night. Glad we didn't have him in the car with us for the second half of the trip! Then after the wedding Saturday night we drove over to Tulsa, OK until Tuesday morning to have our marriage retreat/early 5 year anniversary celebration. Our job actually requires us to take a marriage retreat every year because they're so committed to having healthy marriages among the staff. Isn't that awesome?

We slept, we relaxed, we did just a little bit of shopping, we ate lots of great food (including P.F. Changs, one of our very favorites!), enjoyed buy one get one free peppermint mochas from Starbucks

Have I mentioned this is my favorite drink? I mean, favorite drink EVER.

My very favorite thing we did though was talk and reflect about our marriage and our life! Last week one of Kyle's friends gave him this great book specifically for marriage retreats called "Getting Away to Get It Together"

I highly recommend it to any married couple out there! It was just fantastic! We talked through expectations of our time, and we did two of the "projects" they have in the book - one where we each came up with a one word description for how we're emotionally feeling in several categories listed (marriage, spiritual, relational, etc.) and the other one we did we came up with a list of our top values that we want to define our family as well as Scripture passages to go with each one (and now our Scripture memory plan for next semester!) All in all, we just had a great time being together without Landon (although we were missing him like crazy). It was a great way to celebrate five wonderful years of marriage together!

Then Tuesday morning we left to drive back to my parents' house to pick Landon up and continued our road trip up to Kyle's parents' house for Thanksgiving! It was such a blessing to be with his family, and especially to get to see his siblings and our nieces who we haven't seen since Landon's birthday party in September! We had a blast eating, playing, and just hanging out together. Unfortunately I get an "F" for failure in the picture taking department. I'll have to eventually steal the pictures that my mother-in-law and sister-in-law took because here's my one and only picture from the week:

Landon with his cousins Lydia and Addyson watching Gnomeo and Juliet. I told you he is obsessed!! We actually watched it multiple times throughout the week. Actually, here's a video of them watching it; I just think it's hilarious how intently he watches!

Landon's other favorite thing to play with at Papa & Nana's house was putting little pieces in a peg board:

He's not proud of himself at all, huh? I actually was very impressed; he was able to hold his hand steady enough to stack 8-10 of them on top of each other without knocking the whole tower over. He found it very entertaining as well. And he just loved playing with his cousins and following them around everywhere. We enjoyed having our little punkin' at last year's Thanksgiving, but he was definitely more interactive this year! We're thankful for Landon and our baby girl!