Give Thanks ✽ All sorts of randomness

KBR's Give Thanks x7 challenge opens again in just a couple weeks :)!!! If you are interested in joining and praising God together during the month of November, the details are here :). These challenges have been a wonderful blessing in my life the past few years, and I'm greatly looking forward to it's beginning :)!!!

Tacos are kind of a big deal in our house, in case you didn't now. So when Mama and Dadddy found that big old tub, they knew we'd be able to finish it off before it went bad, haha... Abbi is like the sour cream queen, so she was especially impressed ;). (She used to eat sour cream by the spoonful when she was a baby, right out of the container- if she couldn't get a spoon, she'd use her fingers. So gross. She did, on a number of occasions, have a tub dedicated to her ;).)

We went to the park and the boys had fun racing (I raced, too, because a certain person has been begging me for month, and that ended badly, and not just because I lost once...I did what I am told looked like a Charlie-Brown-kicking-the-football flip in the wooden mulch. Yeah.). It's still weird sometimes to have so many boys around for stuff like this, haha :).

Our friend Johanna with Noah :). When she didn't have him, she took lots of pictures for us, like this one of Noah :)...

I couldn't help but call these two ketchup and mustard all day, haha :)! They were constantly together, and just the right shades :)!

That mushroom looks like it has the cutest face, haha!

I volunteered at my first special needs church respite last month! The respites are where families will drop their special needs children and their siblings off for a few hours every month, and my hope is that by working with these programs, I'll be able to get to know the families and see if there is a way that I could help them. I've considered assistant teaching in a special ed. class for a couple years now, but I'm keeping my options open for a while longer- if there is another more personal and tangible way to work with the families, that is really where I would want to be, and I figure nobody will know that more than the families :). The respite kind of came together last minute, and there weren't many families able to come, so I kind of felt unneeded because there were so many of us volunteers to so few children. And I was kind of nervous going alone to something I wasn't sure what to expect from, haha. (But Daddy made sure I got where I was supposed to be before he left, so that helped :).) But I'm excited to take a small step towards what I've been hoping to do for several years now! I would love to adopt someday, and I would definitely be open to special needs children, so I want to be able to gain experience while helping others in the meantime :). I'm trying to contact another church as well, and we'll see where that goes.

As I said, tacos get frequent recognition here ;). Emmi was proud of her tortilla mask :).

The little girls got their own bibles this year, and they chose ones with personizable covers :). They have been enjoying coloring in the designs and making them their own :). (While eating apple sauce. Because. Apples. Lots of them. Haha :).)

So, this Thursday Mama and Daddy and Noah and I went out so I could drive around in a church parking lot some more (and, among other things, to pick up brackets to hang up the last shelves in our room, and I'm so happy to have that done! Emmi saw them all finally hanging up, and she kind of just stood there looking around and asked, "Bri.... why is our room so... white?..." Haha!). Driving is still... interesting... haha, but I think it's eventually going to get somewhere ;)? I did (finally) park successfully right before we left! But then, I also (accidentally) sped up so fast one time that I panicked and slammed the brake, and Daddy accused me of doing it on purpose to scare them. Lol! As I'm driving across the parking lot, Daddy was telling me, "Turn left, turn left, turn left...".

"TURN LEFT TURN LEFT TURN LEFT!!!" I heard shrieked shrilly out from the back seat.

They'd snuck Walter the snowgie into the car and Mama turned him on for my lesson. 

It was terrifying. 

Haha :).

A few nights ago, I was brushing Emmi's teeth. I happened to look away because someone was talking to me, and when I looked back, her tooth was literally laying across her tongue -not lost, but barely holding on. That was a shock, and I told her she needed to get Daddy to get it out (basically because I'm a chicken, and Daddy and Emmi thought that was too funny..).

Forward to last night: *brushing teeth, tralala, nightly routine* 

Emmi: "Ouch!!!"

Tooth: Jumps four inches into the air and then falls again into her mouth.

Me: "DON'T SWALLOW!!!!!!!"

She's got five missing or barely grown in right now!

The incident itself was very deja vu, because Andrew also lost a tooth while I was brushing his teeth one time. The excited five year old then went to church the next day and let everybody know that he had lost I think it was three teeth in the past 24 hours. "Daddy pulled one, I lost one while I was eating the banana bread Bri made for us, and then Bri knocked the other one out last night", he sweetly told everyone. 

Why nobody ever asked me about that, I'm not sure, but I wanted to hide in embarrassment. 

And before I sign off, I just want to explain the huge amount of posts lately/coming next week; they've all been written for a while, but I'm finally adding pictures to them and just posting them all at once when they've been written here and there over a month... haha. That's why most of it has been "old" news. But I figured, why waste them when they are done, even if they end up late, right ;)? Haha :). I have one coming next week that the little ones had a part in that I think is too fun, and I can't wait to share it with you :)!