Homa turns 95!

Michael's grandmother, Lahoma (who we call Homa!) turned 95 this month.  All the kids and grandkids came to celebrate!  The grandkids sang and danced for her in their own special and unique ways!  And Piper even read her a book aloud!  We enjoyed visiting, laughing, eating, and watching a little football even!

October & November

When I see this, I think ornery!  He's a toot!

Mashed potato face.  Those eyes!!!

I said smile and got this!  Goofball!

Emerson LOVES to play peek-a-boo!  She's peeking through those little fingers!

Briggs being funny in Emerson's car seat.

Piper and I had a rough night one evening and I walked into the kitchen to find this sweet note!  

Briggs likes eating whole apples now, but refuses to let me cut the peel off.  

This little face looks sad but she was quite happy.  Just wouldn't smile for the camera.  I love this little look!

Briggs declared that he was making his teachers a picture and I was going to write "I Love My Teachers" for him.  So I suggested he draw a portrait of his teachers to give them and I'd write that sentence on it.  Every teacher wants a self portrait in which they have piggy snouts, right?!?!  Love!

Piper and I had the privilege to attend Miracle on 34th Street at the Dallas Children's Theater recently.  Our neighbor, Sarah, was a cute little elf in the production!  And Piper got to sit on Santa's lap at the end as well!

These two love each other!

Piper went to a three week basketball clinic with Caroline and Nora. Piper is about to begin her first season of basketball soon!

Oklahoma State was playing Baylor and Piper came out in this outfit for her pj's.  We are indoctrinating this child well!

Poor Briggs has been on breathing treatments for 2 weeks now.  The cough if driving all of us crazy, but I do love how he still manages to have fun and be creative with his Lego's during each treatment! They are no fun!

 And this sweet smile to end my post!

Halloween 2015

When Halloween falls on a Saturday, it's like a breath of fresh air.  So much less stressful!  Halloween 2015 was fun.  Leading up to it, the only thing we did was paint pumpkins.  Piper submitted hers into her school's pumpkin patch contest.  She won the "Boo-tastic" award! Briggs wanted to paint too because Sissy was!

 The weather on Halloween was great!  Cool but not too cold!  All month, Briggs planned to be Batman.  But an hour before we were to leave he went through a few costume changes and decided to be a Ninja Turtle.  I can't ever keep straight if the blue one is Leonardo or Michelangelo!

 Piper was Miss Captain America!

 And Emerson, well...she's the third child!  I promise to dress her up next year!  She's a pretty cute little pumpkin thought!  ;)

 Before trick or treating we had dinner and visited at the home of someone in our neighborhood.  This is our entire family dressed up.  A first for us.  We might need to coordinate something a little better next year if we plan to continue this.  I came up with my burglar outfit pretty fast, and Michael...well, he was on his own!  A hippie, burglar, two super heroes, and my baby money bag!

 We joined some other families to trick or treat from our neighborhood that have second grade girls.  The streets were packed!  Briggs tired out pretty soon.  We had fun and slept hard that night!

November

My blued-eyed beauty.  Oh she melts my heart.  Time please stand still!

 The first day of November began pretty normal with church followed by an improptu family lunch at Spring Creek BBQ.  Excuse the blurry picture.  It still made me laugh.  After we left the restaurant, we went to the mall for a quick errand and later got home around 2 pm.  Thirty minutes later...

The day stopped being normal and took a turn for scary and weird and crazy!  Long story short, I had a few little stroke-like episodes that ended up not being a stroke.  But I was admitted to the hospital for two days.  Up until this point, I had never had any kind of hospital experience except for having babies!  The Lord did sustain me with His peace all along.  I never felt panicked or scared necessarily. I was annoyed.  I was impatient. I was extremely sad to be away from the kids because of the way it all happened and how I was unable to prepare them or say goodbye.  And I was sad because I had never been away from Emerson since she was born!  This was definitely not ideal, but God provided family and friends who blessed us in so many ways and are continuing to as we are back home.  They basically just took over our life for our kids and it was amazing!  Is amazing!  God allowed this to happen but prevented anything terrible from taking place.  God answered some immediate prayers after we asked.  And I continue praying what he's teaching me and how he wants to use me in this.  I would love to see something in this series of events glorify his name!  Use me Lord!  We are so thankful for every single person who helped us.  I don't even know what everyone did!  And we are so thankful for the encouragement, the prayers, phone calls, the texts, the flowers, goodies, etc!  Just so thankful.  So appreciative!  So encouraged to see the Body of Christ working together also...

Friends are bringing meals each evening.  One night we had baked spaghetti and this munchkin gobbled it up!  I love spaghetti face!  

 And just to show you something random and unrelated, enlarge this picture and just take time to soak in the craziness of this photo.  On Saturday, we relaxed and the kids all played happily alongside each other.  It seemed to quiet when I went to check on them!

I'll post about Halloween soon!!