thanksgiving, et cetera

Towards the end of November, all the leaves finally changed colors and started to fall.

Usually lots of leaves means crisp fall air and jumping in piles, but up here they kinda just get too wet for that.

Doesn't mean we can't go out for walks though.

Colder weather does mean sweater weather.

And snuggling up with a book in the morning on a weekend.

And learning about cold weather clothes in preschool.

And when it gets really cold, things get... Frozen!

Just a cute photo, that's all.

Brooklyn and Daddy went on an outing to the mall. Brooklyn loves the Lego store, which truly means she's related to her dad.

She also loves the Disney store, also known as the "princess store." Pretty sure she's reading a Frozen book while watching a Frozen sing-along on their big screen.

Thanksgiving morning, Brooklyn wanted to make breakfast in bed for Mommy. So Austin "helped." Stuffed french toast with banana and strawberry syrup, fried eggs, and strawberry yogurt with granola.

After breakfast, Brooklyn got to watch a "show" -- she loves Strawberry Shortcake.

We stayed in town for Thanksgiving this year and met up with some friends for a tasty dinner. Brooklyn was very excited to eat with her friends at the kid table.

One of our Thanksgiving traditions is our "thankful tree."

We put leaves on the tree every day or so with something we're thankful for. Or in Brooklyn's case, somethings.

Since we were at home for Thanksgiving weekend, we wasted no time to kick off the Christmas season -- Friday morning we got the decorations out.

Brooklyn was very excited to help with the ornaments.

We let her do a few by herself...

...and then tried to give the ornaments some breathing room and spacing across the tree.

We have another smaller tree that we decided was perfect for Brooklyn's room. This is the tree that we put all our childhood ornaments on.

When Brooklyn took this ornament from 1983 out of the box, she said "Evan!"

More popular than the decorations were the books -- especially the Charlie Brown Christmas book narrated by Grandma Taylor! 

It turns out Brooklyn is a budding Lego expert -- she had no problem helping Daddy put together the spaceship he got for Christmas last year. She was a pro at looking at the directions and finding the right blocks.

Thanksgiving weekend we got a little bit of snow -- just enough to merit putting on hats and scarves and playing outside for a bit.

Someone was pretty happy about it.

We even bundled up Evan to take outside for a few minutes.

Between the relatively wimpy snow and the fact that we've become much more wimpy about cold weather since moving up here, this is the epic snowman we made.