LET THE COUNTDOWN BEGIN

GOBBLE GOBBLE

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday! I love getting together with family and eating yummy food. This year we all piled up into the Camry and headed up to Chesapeake, VA. It was a long 10 hour drive, but so well worth it!!!

Portraits from Thanksgiving 2012

This holiday Khyri took special interest in the family pictures all around the house. He liked pointing out which picture matched each person in the room. I really like that he can remember names so well, even though we don't get to see the family that often. It makes me smile when he sees a picture a picture of my mom and says "That's Grandma Millie"

Grandma, also know as GiGi, was up working hard making the baked macaroni and cheese. I can't decide which dish I like the most - mac n cheese, collard greens, or candied yams. They're all so yummy. Who says I need to pic just one anyway!?!?

My cousins highjacked my camera and started snapping pictures. I love this one of my grandfather or as the munchkins call him - Pop Pop :-)

almost 90 years old and still dresses fresh to death!

Good food, Good meat, Good lord, Let's eat!

After the food is all gone - its bonding time :-)

 

 

The K girls - Kenya, Kahlillah and Kielle

Nick and Kimiyo

Caught! Brianna giving the gas face

...and of course we had leftovers for the next two days. I think Khyri was looking for some chicken fingers after day two. Kielle, aka little miss munch-a-lot, ate Thanksgiving food every chance she got - with no complaints.

This year we added a new tradition (in addition to the adult Black Friday early morning outing - woot woot!) of making Christmas stocking and cookies. I've never made cookies so this was a full on experiment. Luckily my cousin Tam was on deck to help with the project. Armed with spray oil, sugar cookie dough, and Christmas themed cookie cutters we set out to work.

 

Khyri was excited to put the cookies into the oven to bake. He lined up right next to Brianna like he was in school :-)

 

Our final product didn't look the best, but they tasted really good. I didn't know that I was supposed to have some icing and stuff to decorate the top with. We'll be ready next Thanksgiving with sprinkles and all types of yumminess.

Our other craft for the night was making Christmas stockings. Earlier in the evening we went to Dollar Tree and Walmart to get our craft supplies. We found these extra large stockings at Dollar Tree that were perfect for decorating. Before we let out our inner Martha Stewart, Kimiyo and Nick wrapped a very special Christmas present.

Notice that Kielle still has her cookie in hand! She is a munchkin for real.

While we decorated our stockings, Nick read some questions from the board game Would You Rather. Some of the questions were hilarious - Would you rather have your toenails grow uncontrollably or sneeze incessantly? Would you rather wear 18 inch heels or pants that are 4 sizes too small? I mean seriously - how about neither... hahahaha

We used glitter, foam sticky letters, and different foam holiday shapes like ornaments, snowflakes, gingerbread men, and Christmas trees to decorate our stockings.

Poor Grandma tried to hang with the young folks.. not.so.much. hahahaah She gets points for trying to stay up though :-)

Kenya spent a lot of time protecting her stocking from Kielle haahhah

 

Some of our finished stockings

What a great way to bring in the holiday season - with family and crafts!

HALLOWEEN HATS

We decided to step it up a little bit for Halloween this year. We bought some small pumpkins for outside the house and also made some Halloween crafts! We skipped buying new costumes and instead focused on the new found interest of the moment - hats :-)

So we decided to be the Mosley Mad Hatters! The plan was to get a bunch of hats and decorate each one for a different theme - nature, arts and crafts, colors, etc. We started first with an arts and crafts hat. We used string, cotton balls, and felt to decorate the hat.

 

 

Khyri's final creation!

Khyri had a good time decorating the hat, but clearly this was a private hat - not meant to be seen in public! hahahahaha. Seeing this debacle - I scraped the group craft idea and just made the rest of the hats myself. I wanted to make sure the whole family was included in the hatravaganza so hubby got a football themed hat.

Daddy's Football Hat

 

 

Mommy's Block Head Hat

I used some well loved toy blocks as a topper for my hat creating a unique Block Head hat :-) To add a little boo to the house, I made two ghosts out of an old table cloth. One time for repurposing!

 

Khyri's school had a fall festival complete with a costume parade, trains, haystacks,and a pumpkin decorating contest.

 

Kielle dressed up as a Falcon's cheerleader and Khyri revived The Cat in The Hat for his parade.

On Saturday we participated in my Sorority's annual Trunk or Treat event at Ficket Elementary School. This year the munchkins didn't help hand out candy - but they sure looked the part with hats of course :-)

 

You're never too old to have fun!

We're thinking that until the munchkins can say what they want to be for Halloween we will just do themed shirts and hats for awhile. Costumed or not, the best part of Halloween is hanging out together being silly!