Thanksgiving

Cody and Jaden brought home some precious Thanksgiving-related crafts from kindergarten. I loved seeing which items they said they were thankful for.

Even now that Thanksgiving is past, we are still using these colorful, double-sided placemats. What wonderful keepsakes!

A couple weeks prior to Thanksgiving, I saw this great idea from one of my favorite websites for kid-friendly activities: www.handsonaswegrow.com. This thankfulness tree was super easy to make, and the boys really loved adding their own leaves to the tree, especially because they could do so independently. Both boys eagerly went to town adding multiple leaves a day.

A couple of my favorite leaves included "Grammy's rolls" and "Grandma's mints."

Adley loved participating in our family thankfulness project as well. Her idea of fun, however, was daily attempting to taste-test each of the new leaves! We eventually had to rearrange our leaves so all of them were on the highest branches. :)

One of our Texas friends had gifted us with this super-cute Thanksgiving outfit for Adley before she was even born. I was excited to see that the size was a perfect fit on Adley! 

We started out our Thanksgiving Day by worshiping at Matt and Kim's church with my parents and our Schleicher-side family members (minus Andy and Beth). You'll notice that we're all wearing sweaters or long-sleeved shirts. Hooray for seasonal weather! :)

After the church service, we had the Schleicher clan over to our home for a Thanksgiving lunch. Everyone helped by bringing multiple side dishes or desserts for the meal, so our role of doing just the turkey, beans, and two kinds of potatoes felt fairly simple.

Jaden and Cody were very proud of their festively decorated place cards for the meal. I thought the place cards turned out very cute as well.

We tried having a kids' table with these four goofballs for the Thanksgiving meal. The cousins did get fairly silly during the meal, but they obviously enjoyed the time together. 

Here is the rest of the clan...

Family is definitely one of the top items on our thankfulness list! We are so thankful that we could spend Thanksgiving with all of these family members. It was a great, relaxing time together.

Most of all, though, we are thankful for our Savior Jesus who gave His life so that we could have forgiveness and eternal life. What a precious gift that we can be called children of God and experience the joy of His presence each day!