Pies, prisms, tables, and too many blessings to count

November was a month of thankfulness. I was so glad for President Nelson's counsel to focus on gratitude for our many blessings! Of course I try to do that all the time. But having a specific invitation from the prophet helped me get serious about it! I could list a million things I'm grateful for and never run out. Here are some things I was thankful for just this month.

• I haven't taught any of the children to ride bikes for…well…years now. I can't remember the last one of them I taught! But it is much better that way. Siblings are such good teachers! I was so happy when I looked outside and saw Sebastian running along helping Teddy ride his bike.

I think Sebastian taught Daisy too, years ago. And Marigold. Anyway, he went out with Teddy several times this month and even set up some little cone courses for him to practice on. Teddy is getting pretty good!

• And what is this? A baby riding a trike? What a precocious child. I hope he's thankful for his big sisters. I sure am!

• One of our biggest blessings this month was getting our new kitchen table! I have loved the round table we've had since Malachi was a baby. It was perfect in our old house…but sadly ill-fitting in the new one. Before we even moved in, we hunted everywhere for one that would work better, but it was so hard to find anything—it is difficult to find tables to seat twelve at all, but the ones we did find were much too long for our little dining area! After much deliberation and frustration, we found someone that would make us a table exactly to fit. And in mid-November it was finally finished! So here is our last meal on the dear round table.

And here is everyone waiting and watching expectantly for the delivery…

Here are the boys watching the men screw the table legs on (Ziggy was playing that he was a "Table Man" before they even left)…

And here is our beautiful new table! We have loved it so much. We could eat anywhere, of course! We didn't truly NEED a new one. But there were several little miracles in the finding and getting of it, and we are so grateful. It has already felt like such a huge blessing for our family to have this gathering spot.

First meal at the new table!

And I sold our old table to someone who is going to refinish it and love it, so there are happy endings all around! She drove off with it tied to the top of her car. :)

• Look, I reached a 1000-day streak of learning French on Duolingo! I'm so thankful for this easy, free option for learning languages. At this stage in my life, I would never be able to do anything at a higher commitment level, but I can manage 5 minutes a day on my phone! I am by no means fluent, but I have remembered much of my high school French and I love practicing it.

• I'm so thankful for time we get to spend as a family. With older kids and busy schedules, I have lately been learning not to take it for granted! And our Family Home Evenings have been a little…sad…since we moved! It's because Sam has classes till later on Monday nights, so we moved our Family Nights to Tuesday, but we can't seem to remember that they're on Tuesday! We are always remembering right at bedtime and then doing something hurried and unplanned. Anyway, THIS night was an exception (though still hurried and not very planned) because Sam had each person draw a picture outlining why his or her favorite animal was the BEST animal. It was hilarious! Abe's sheet full of graphs about bears. Goldie's irrefutable list about elephants. ("Strongest anaml. Biggist land anaml. Eats the most food I know. Dusint run away. Dus not leve babyes. Its the gentlest anaml. Can paint. Ar not carnarvors.") Sam's sharks, of course, and ALL of the pictures! It was a great activity, and even though there is fighting too…always…it does something healing to my heart when we are all together, having fun.

• Sebastian and Malachi share a room, and Malachi got his half looking pretty good soon after we moved in, but Sebastian WOULD NOT. He was at school and cross-country for long hours every day, in his (undeserved) defense, and normally he likes to keep a neat room, but apparently unpacking everything and figuring out where it would go was TOO MUCH. I asked him to clean it up seven hundred times over a month and a half (because poor Malachi! And also, you can't just leave boxes piled in your room forever! It's indecent!) and he said "I KNOW!" about five hundred of those times (and ignored me the other two hundred), and then I TOLD him he HAD to, and then I tried to take away privileges, and give consequences, and use logic and reason, and everything else I could think of, but he didn't, and didn't, and didn't. So finally I gave up and let him experience the consequence of living in the squalor he deserved  cleaned it for him one day when he was at school. How is that for excellent parenting? :(

On the bright side, though, it looked SO much better and I was so grateful to have it done! I breathed a pleased and satisfied sigh of contentment every time I walked past. And I took a picture to memorialize it! 

• Another bright spot: the aforementioned 15-year-old is learning to drive now! What a blessing! And he's actually a joy to drive with. Friendly and talkative and eager to learn. I really like going on drives with him. One day we loaded his and Malachi's bike in the van and went to a bike park across the valley. They had fun showing me all their tricks, and it was such a pretty (if cold) fall day!

• We got Seb's bed from the classifieds and it came with a twin-sized trundle bed that went with it. We were delighted to discover that the trundle bed fit under the girls' bunk beds! Another miracle! At first I wasn't sure we'd even be able to use it, but now Goldie sleeps very snugly there. (And actually, Daisy and Junie don't ever end up sleeping in their separate bunks, so I suppose Goldie could have just had the other bunk! But we're so thankful for the trundle all the same.)

• Malachi had his last few Race Cats (that's his cross-country team) races. I'm so thankful to have gotten to see some new parks and enjoy being outside. We haven't had much free time for going out to parks lately, but this gave at least some of us the chance to! It was fun when Abe and Seb came along to help me cheer for Ky.

I particularly liked this park by the river in Spanish Fork. It was a warmish day with a cold front blowing in, and the sun and the dark sky were so pretty together! I had a long time to walk around and explore while I was waiting for him to run.

And then I saw a bunny!

He let me watch him for quite awhile, and then went hopping off into his hole with his little white tail flashing, so that was very happy for me. And just after the race ended and Malachi and I got in the car, it started raining and hailing, so we also got the cozy satisfaction of knowing we'd just avoided the bad weather. A good day full of things to be grateful for!

• Here is a maze Teddy drew. I love it so much.

• For school one day before Thanksgiving, we made a bunch of Thanksgiving crafts to use for table decorations. I am not a very "crafty" sort of person and I ONLY do crafts as part of school, when it feels like it's killing two birds with one stone somehow, but the children really love it. And it was actually quite fun. I liked us all just sitting at the table and working together, and was so thankful for the peace I felt knowing nothing else was on the agenda.

We made pumpkins…

And turkeys, of course.

And this super-cute Indian corn! I love how it looks.

And everything looked so lovely on our Thanksgiving table a few days later!

• Sebastian chose homemade donuts again for his Thanksgiving Week breakfast. (It stretches into two weeks now. And some of them end up being dinners. But it's a tradition that the kids love! Everyone chooses a favorite breakfast and then we all say [and I write down] things we're thankful for about that person while we eat their breakfast.) Anyway, these donuts are so good! This time I made maple frosting to go on them and I think they were even better than last year.

• How could anyone not be thankful for this darling (but scary) baby Gus? He's particularly scary when he's eating. He has a scary homping mouth and if you are unfortunate enough to leave a trailing finger near his teeth when handing him some food…you will regret it. He also just looks so PLEASED with himself while eating. Insufferably so, really, don't you think? How did he get so big? He is not at ALL the same waif-like baby he once was.

Here he is sharing a few sweet moments with Daisy. And looking rather…how shall I put this…fat!😱 I'm thankful he is fat. We had a few months of worry when he was the tiniest skeenykins!

• Here's a funny little brown-eyed ghost I'm grateful for. Right after this he smacked face-first into the back of the couch because he was walking with the blanket over his head. I remember when Sebby used to do that ALL THE TIME. Ha! He brings the rest of us endless amusement!

• I'm grateful for pie-making! My mom took my college-age niece and my three oldest boys down to Southern Utah for a couple days during their school break, so we had our Thanksgiving Dinner on Friday. Those of us who stayed home spent a good deal of Thursday making pies, which gets more fun every year with my girls! And it was extra fun watching my helpers help the little boys as well.

We made four kinds of pie and six pies…well, five, but one of them was a doubled recipe in a cake pan. And I don't think we used quite every bowl in the house…but close. 

Daisy made the whole chocolate chip cookie pie (it's a variation on this; we love it and make it every year) by herself, including most of the crust-rolling, and Junie made the entire pomegranate pie by herself too! That was a new recipe for us this year, because my mom had given us a bunch of pomegranate arils. It was so good! And a very pretty pie.

The other pies were lemon sour cream and key lime. So, so good. We enjoyed them for several days afterward. Why didn't I take a picture of them all together? I always mean to and I never do it.

I did manage a picture of our pretty Thanksgiving table, though! We had my mom and niece over and there was room for all of us to sit at the table together!

The girls wore their new velvet dresses (Old Navy!)

Two Goldies. My favorite color! I wish I had a matching dress too.

And here we all are, ready to eat. We had a wonderful dinner, climbed up our hill, the kids hung all over Sarah like monkeys, and we sang joyful Thanksgiving hymns around the piano. I love Thanksgiving!

• I'm so grateful for nice weather we had in November! Even when it was cold, it was sunny and clear. Seb drove the girls and me up to a tiny reservoir nearby in the foothills one day. It was a lovely warm day and the girls even waded a little!

• Skilled workers. What a blessing! The laquer of our piano got chipped/damaged a little in the move and a nice man came to fix it for us. It was amazing to watch him work. When he was done, you couldn't tell the chip had ever been there!

• I had a vision of hanging prisms in some of our sunny windows and Sam helped me make it into reality. I could never have figured out how to hang them without him! But of course he drew it all out on paper and figured out a pattern that was just asymmetrical enough. :)

I hoped that they would make some pretty rainbows on the walls, like the beveled mirror and the cut-glass window in our front door used to make in our old house.

But when the sun came up the next morning and I went into the library (that's what we call this little room) in the morning—I was astonished because there were rainbows EVERYWHERE! It was so beautiful!! I wanted to live my whole life in that room.

And as a bonus, Gussie chases them all over the floor and tries to pounce on them—like a cat.

• Speaking of rainbows, here is another rainbow sky we had a few weeks ago. I love it so much when the sky is like this—so that everything under it is lit by that warm pink light. And it is always over so quickly! You have to drop everything and run out to see, or you'll miss it!

Moon and pink sky

Glowing Mount Timpanogos 

Fiery Sunset

What an abundance of blessings I have to be grateful for. Heavenly Father and Jesus are so, so generous with their gifts!