A Thankful Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving came and quickly passed by this year- so that was sad...it seems as though I hardly get to enjoy the holiday, because of all the Christmas hoopla going on at the same time- don't get me wrong, I love Christmas and all that comes along with it, but it can overshadow the "Thankful Thanksgiving" for me...
I saw a slogan for St. Jude's the other day, and I really like it and would love to keep it going year round in our house- it's called "Thanks and Giving"....tonight for FHE we talked about giving rather than receiving and how it is nice to give thanks daily for all that we have. That isn't easy to do for an adult, sometimes, let alone children. But we expect a lot out of our kids, so we helped them understand, and we set up this fun "Countdown to Christmas" craft that will help us this month:
On the back of each number there is a service activity that we can do as we remove the days counting down to Christmas. The kids are very excited. I have to say that I do love that Thanksgiving is near Christmas, because they seem to remain in the "thanks and giving" spirit. Well, I try to, anyway! (All good ideas are stolen, by the way, and this one came from this blog that I follow :thebargainjargon.com) For ours, I google image searched the numbers and then copied them to a word document and then cut them out and pasted them on card stock- the entire activity took about an hour- the kids loved it! Here are a few close-ups too:

Anyway, back to Thanksgiving itself: Dana and I were fortunate enough to attend a Broadway Production on Wednesday night at the Theatre- "In the Heights"- and my parents kept the kids overnight, so we woke up without them on Thanksgiving! We had a blast at the play, by the way- it was really wonderful- amazingly talented performers and fantastic music! We took 7 girls from Dana's Spanish III class and a few parents too- they were so happy and very appreciative, since they didn't have to pay for tickets- The Spanish Club at their school funded it- so yeah, we were grateful too! We ventured over to my parents in the afternoon and finished preparing our portion of the big dinner- and then headed to Sean and Stephanie's to enjoy it all! Fabulous as usual, and this year my dad deep-fried the turkey and it was delicious. Afterward, I brought along this fun craft for the kiddos to make- another stolen idea- from Familyfun.com- but so fun for them: Here are some other random shots- I didn't take too many- I was exhausted by this time- we didn't eat until after 5, so the tryptophan was really kickin in!! The girls in their matching clothes from Aunt Liza
Getting these 6 together in a shot with everyone looking- yeah, harder than it looks, I promise!
Gotta love Oreo's
Thanksgiving 2009- so much to be thankful for- I could start listing, but it would never stop- I am truly blessed in my life-