So silly, but Kobi liked it. 

Here Kobi has them fighting. 

I forgot to show you guys our imagination time action figures we made. Here is Boxman and Dew man. Kobi loved making them. 

There Linda is, with the other buff girls. Crazy, huh! 

This is her now. I just had to show this. She did this in a matter of 8 months. She was in a body building competition in NY. She took 5th place. 

This is Linda, my sister, before she hit the gym. 

K.C.'s sister, Eryn, Sonyo, and Xayla 

The day after Thanksgiving, we went to a Rebel game. 

The Rebels finally won a game!  

Look how cute Dad and daughter look at the game. 

Xayla's new glasses :) and K.C.'s sister Sara. 

Here is My Mom, my Aunt, Sonyo, and myself. 

Here is Sonyo and myself 

There was a good article in the Dec. Ensign on Christmas traditions (pg 11). It was really neat. It gave several examples of some of the traditions these families did for Christmas. It gave me some ideas. I want my children to understand the true meaning of Christmas. I am going to try the one that talks about scripture references and treats 12 days before Christmas.  

Here we are on Thanksgiving day. My sister, Sonyo, came to town. We had so much fun. We ate at K.C.'s parents house for lunch and my Aunt's house for dinner. I was stuffed. I had to hit the gym nice and hard today. It was fun just hanging out. Yesterday, I made cinnamon rolls (turned out pretty good) and we watched The Polar Express. It was so much fun. We drank hot chocolate as well. I love the hoilday season. We bought several Christmas classic (Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph, The Trumpet Boy), and we are going to watch them together as a family.  

A closer look at our tree. 

Here is our little tree. This was the tree I used when it was just Kobi and I. I just can't get rid of it. 

The kids decided to put some pillows on the floor and admire our tree. I love angels, so our tree has predominately angels as decorations and red. Red is my favorite color. 

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

I know, I know. Thanksgiving is not even here yet. We are going over to K.C.'s parents house in the afternoon and to my Mother's house in the evening on Thanksgiving. I am making a Sweet Potato Casserole and a Green Been Casserole. I am working on cooking better. It has been fun trying new recipes. It is no fun when the recipe turns out bad :(.

Kobi and I decorated the inside of our house on Sunday. (We will have to post pictures later.) We put the tree up and placed our small amount of Christmas decorations around the house. We played Christmas music and drank hot chocolate. K.C. was studying for an exam, and we had to put Xayla to bed first because she would have made a mess. When she woke up in the morning, she was so excited. She kept saying "Ooooo" and "light". I love the holiday season. Kobi and I are afraid to put anything in our front yard. I had a real cute Thanksgiving decoration that somehow came up missing. It is a decoration. Why steal? It's frustrating.

Kobi wants Santa to bring us a PS3. Only if he knew that Santa is broke this year. It is hard at this age because I love that he believes in Santa, but it's hard trying to explain that maybe Santa can't bring something. Every time I tell him, "We can not afford that." He says, "That's OK, I will ask Heavenly Father to tell Santa to bring it to us. You won't have to buy anything." I hope he is not disappointed this Christmas. I am just going to have to stress the true meaning of Christmas, and that it is not about gifts. That is how I am going to approach this situation.

I hope everyone fills their belly full and gives thanks to Heavenly Father for our MANY blessings! Happy Thanksgiving!

Imagination time

I have been reading a book called Raising Respectful Children in a Disrespectful World by Jill rugby (ISBN# 978-1-58229-574-9). It was suggested by Dr Laura Schlesinger. People either love her or hate her. Anyway, it is a really good book. She talks about how respect is going away in this world. If you raise your children to respect others, then they will respect themselves. This will cause them to respect morals and values. It is a really good book. One thing I really got out of it was creative things you can do with your children. She had a suggestion of imagination time. You can do anything during this time. One thing she suggested was saving old oatmeal boxes, cereal boxes, just anything you were going to throw away and make stuff out of it with marker, crayons, or whatever you want. It sounded fun.

Kofi and I started doing imagination time. He loves it! Some of the things we have done are:
1. We have a play tent in the playroom and we turned off all the light in the room. We lit a candle, and I played "The Sounds of Nature" CD. It had music of the ocean, birds, the wind, rain, etc. We pretended like we were camping out. Then, we read stories in the tent and played board games like: Junior Scrabble and Guess Who. We tried to make a house out of a deck of cards, but it was kind of hard in the tent. It was so much fun! My back hurt after because the tent was kind of little for me. This made Kofi do his homework quicker, so that we could have time for imagination!
2. Another thing we did was make animals and objects out of paper. I found this book that showed you how. We tried to do it. Some of it was hard! I was able to make a swan.
3. We made up a story and we acted it out.
4. We had a spa day. We took turns doing spa things: soaking our feet in my little foot soaker, doing pretend manicures, putting these little soaks on our eyes, putting lotion on. It actually was really fun. Kofi said, "Now this is the life".

It has been so much fun. I highly recommend the book. She also discusses being "unplugged" from electronic devices. Let your imagination work.

If anything, you get quality time :).

Car ride. 

At the Pumkin Patch. 

Go again Mom? 

Yes, that is Xayla going down the big slide at eh Pumkin Patch. She loved it! She is so fearless. 

One more thing, the pumkin cost $3.00 at Smiths versus the pumkin patch (the one with the rides off of Stephanie and Sunset) wanted $20.00 for the same size! What a rip-off. Especially if they go bad in our weather in a couple of days. I would have been so mad if I spent $20 on a pumkin from the pumkin patch.  

Kobi was so proud of our pumkin. He wanted to carry it all over the house. Then when it started molding so quickly, he freaked out. He said, "Mom, the pumkin is growing hair!" It was mold. Yuck! 

My first pumkin I have ever carved in my life! Kobi helped me. I don't know if I will carve any next year. It was fun doing it as a family project, but it got bad so quickly here because of the heat. I just bought some pumkins you can plug into the wall from Target the day after Halloween for 50% off. I think that is what we will use next year.