So Much to be Thankful For

For Thanksgiving this year, we were able to celebrate with both of our families.  We drove into Austin and stayed at Julie's parent's on Wednesday night had an incredible lunch with Julie's side of the family, 21 people to be exact.  The kids didn't mind the drastic drop in temperature as they continued to play outside throughout the day.  What a great day with incredibly yummy food and great people.

That afternoon we headed south to Craig's family's Ranch to spend the rest of the weekend with them. We LOVE the Ranch but there is something about spending holidays there, it just feels right. We had a wonderful full day on Friday, enjoying all God created with our wonderful family.  

Jack is working hard raking leaves while the other kids play, hide, throw, and play some more.

Precious Lucy

A new fun thing to do at the Ranch-throw rocks, MeDad's little helper 

Caleb on a hike with Daddy 

Jack and Luke exploring the hillside 

Uncle Allen with a snake 

Mr. Albert allowed us to play on this special area full of bulldozers--Caleb's favorite word and thing to watch

Pretty excited to be on his favorite piece of equipment 

A real farmer, showing off the awesome new boots Mammy gave him (he didn't take them off once) 

 

Lucy on the zip line

 Caleb on the zip line 

Luke was flying on the zip line (I hardly got a good picture of him) 

Enjoying the Mule with Mammy and Luke 

A game of tickle/wrestle/pounce on Kracker 

We decided to break the drive up and head back to Austin on Saturday afternoon.  We were then able to have dinner with Julie's parents and Mimi and enjoyed dessert at Craig's parent's where we stayed the night and enjoyed some much needed r & r from all the traveling.  (Julie looks like she ate very well over the Thanksgiving weekend-at 30.5 weeks)

We left Austin early on Sunday to beat the traffic heading north and had a productive afternoon at home.  It was a whirlwind of a Thanksgiving but so much fun and our last road trip for a long time-it was worth it!

We do have so much to be thankful for and are blessed each and everyday the Lord gives us.

PS--So Sad-Julie left our camera at home (actually Julie left it outside for an entire week-oops but fortunately it still works) and the smaller camera Julie carries in her purse didn't have a battery charge.  We had the replacement batteries for the other camera but not the smaller one.  SO SAD!!! So the pictures we have our limited--still kicking myself.  Thanks to Julie's Mom for developing the top 2 pictures and snail mailing them to us...we can now post our blog. The rest of these pictures are from Craig's phone-not too bad (just ignore Julie's finger in the upper right hand corner of many of the pictures)!