Well, today I cooked and hosted thanksgiving dinner at my house for the first time with some friends, and I dare to say it was a total success! (but not with out the help army of four little men and their drill sergeant dad cleaning the house top to bottom.)  I’m feeling quite content with myself, it was all tasty, we all had a great time, and my pies were quite adorable… Now that everything is cleaned up and put away, I’m completely spent!  Time to snuggle up with hubby and vegg in front of the tv.

Couldn’t let the day come to a close though, with out posting a little happy Thanksgiving on my bloggy.  Today I’m thankful for my beautiful family, and this life we have together.

Today we had a nice surprise, our first snow of the year!  I don’t know if last year we didn’t have any snow to speak of, or if i just didn’t fight the urge to actually go into said snow, but these are the first snow pictures I’ve taken of the boys in quite some time:

I guess those were worth going out in the cold for…

Today officially marks my last day of “vacation” so I’m glad we were able to squeeze a bit of extra fun into it.

So, I’m all uber determined this year to start my planning and plotting and creating nice and early for the whole Christmas thing.  And I’ve started a bit of crafting and a lot of planning, but today marked my first “official” Christmas act: The taking of the Christmas photo…

Now, If you’ve been following me over the past several years, you might remember the joys of this task.  The mom part of me wants to love every second of it, to let them just do whatever they want and to magically walk away from it with 70 perfect pics… but, the other mom part of me wants to pull my hair out as soon as we start!

I did my best to bring both sides of me together and I took the guys out in the back yard with their new coordinating tops.  My strategy this year is just to take pictures like a million different days and see if maybe we can get that perfect photo somewhere in there with out making ourselves completely crazy.  Tonight we had about, oh, 3 shots before everything started to get a little crazy; but what I’m beginning to realize after about a decade of the whole Christmas photo gig is that beauty of it all really is in the out takes. Like a glimpse at a whole sequence of nuttiness and smiles that never fail to melt this mommy’s heart when I see them all uploaded on my laptop…

… as you can see that this photo shoot was really no exception <3

I’m pretty sure we didn’t get “the one” tonight, but we did get a bunch of smiles and adorable shots. I know these pictures will be close to my heart for a long time.  Hope to have more “outtakes” to show you soon.

Mom: (sings) I love you Tennyson, oh yes I do

I love you Tennyson, it’s true

When you’re not with me I’m blue…

Tennyson: (sings) I’m orange!

Mom: (snickers) Oh Tennyson I love you!