Wreaths Across America

This past weekend, Jes and I took the kids to lay wreaths at the national cemetery here in Houston with an organization called Wreaths Across America.  This group purchases, ships and organizes thousands of volunteers to lay Christmas wreaths on the graves of veterans all across the country.

Honestly, I had never heard of this organization until someone in our Scout group mentioned it on our discussion board.  We like to do things like this, something that serves others that we can all be involved in, which can be a challenge to find.  

We got up bright and early and drove to a local mall, where we parked the car and hopped on a shuttle that took us to the cemetery.

Here's Caleb sitting with Jes.  The kids were a little too excited to be riding a bus since they've never been on one.  They've just not had a reason to be.

Here are the kids during the ceremony.  It was a beautiful tribute to all those men and women who have and do give up everything for our country.  I come from a long line of veterans, some of which never made it home from war, so it was very moving for me.

Here is just a small area of the cemetery in which we were working.  It was a sobering reminder of all those who served, just from our area.

This outing gave us some great talking points with the kids and giving of ourselves to help those whose family could not.  I'm so glad that we stumbled on this organization and we will be participating year after year!

Piper's Girl Scout Christmas Party

When we moved to Houston, I managed to find Caleb a Scout pack for him to get involved in.  Here in Houston, the homeschool community is large and has many different resources available to it, with many homeschool groups near to us. One such group is the umbrella group for Caleb's Scout pack and has a Girl Scout pack for the sisters of the boys who are involved in the Scout pack.

When I went to sign Caleb up and attend our first meeting, I was stopped by one of the moms and asked if I wanted Piper to join their Daisy group.  I told her she could sit in and let me know if she liked it and of course she did, so I signed her up.

She's had such a great few months and made some sweet friends.  Her leader is so sweet and threw a little Christmas party for the girls and took photos AND emailed them to us!  

Here are some of the girls (and the one brother who is not old enough for Scouts) working on a coloring page.

With this group of girls, lots and lots of crafts are made and brought home.  So fun!

This fun game involved the girls blowing through a straw to push a marshmallow across the floor.  I can just imagine the hilarity of this!  If only I was a fly on the wall...

This picture just cracks me up!  What a sweet little group of girls!

Thanksgiving

This year for Thanksgiving, we decided to go back to Dallas and spend the holiday at my parent's house.  They are in the process of getting it ready to sell and my mom was very concerned that it would sell at Christmas and they would have to be out, thus displacing all of the family.
This year, everyone got to come, except my youngest brother's wife, who had to work, unfortunately.  We had a great time and ate and just hung out.

Unfortunately, this was the only photo I managed to take, but it's a pretty cute one of P in her Thanksgiving dress. 

Frozen came out the day after Thanksgiving, so my mom, niece, Caleb, Piper and I met my friend Miriam and her sister and her oldest (Piper's best friend) at the movie.  I have to say, Frozen is probably my favorite Disney movie to date and the music is just to die for!

We had some family photos taken the next day, Saturday, but I wasn't happy with many of them, so I won't post any just yet.  The photos from that session that I did like, we will use on our Christmas cards, so I won't divulge those quite yet!

On Sunday, we packed everything up after church and headed back to Houston so that Jes could make it back to work on Monday.  It was a great weekend and we had a great time!