End of November

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. The end of November was a little rough in our house. We did have some fun moments though. Our beautiful autumn colors lasted well in to the end of November.

We've had such beautiful birds visit our house since we moved in. This fall has brought a lot of these beautiful blue birds. 

The road going to our house. The big house up on top of the hill is HUGE and looks so out of place, yet neat at the same time. 

Colorful trees in our front yard

More colors in our front yard

I wish I had taken a picture of these vineyards a few weeks earlier. They are just down the road from our house and look so pretty in the evening light. There are tons of vineyards around here which made for some pretty drives at the end of the summer and early fall. 

We had about 2 weeks of "rainy" days. These two weeks were good practice for me to find some good ways to entertain the kids during the long rainy winter season.They said it would rain all day every day, but we really didn't get much more than a light mist or drizzle on most days.   It still was enough to make everything very wet and to get the moss growing. I've decided since moving to Oregon, that I LOVE moss. It's everywhere... even on the roads in the part of the lane where the tires usually aren't. It's pretty cool .

Ginny has discovered how fun coloring can be!

Our little acrobat likes to hang upside down in her bed, then flips herself over. When the kids are supposed to be sleeping at night and she starts fussing, we often find her stuck in this position!

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Moss coming back to life in our backyard.  

During those rainy days Hayden was begging me to decorate for Christmas, so we decided to deck out their play room before the rest of the house got touched. It was a fun way to get in the mood for Christmas! Hayden helped me make snowflakes. I made the felt tree and ornaments on the back wall so the kids could decorate the tree over and over. It looks a little sad because Ginny keeps pulling the branches away from the wall. 

Another shot of the Christmas decor in the room.  I build a corner shelf so we could put the tree up high so it wouldn't get destroyed. We spent a couple hours making ornaments out of pipe cleaners and fuzz balls.

One of Dirk's best friend's and old college roomate, Mikey, and his family came for Thanksgiving. I was so excited when they decided to come, because it gave me an excuse to play hostess. They were supposed to stay through Saturday, but unfortunately, their son wasn't feeling to well and had a horrible night, so they ended up leaving to go back home in the middle of the night, early Friday morning. We were pretty bummed as we had planned an entire weekend with them and were looking forward to getting to know his wife better. At least they only live 5hrs away, so hopefully we'll get another chance to spend some time with them in the near future. After they left we didn't really know what to do with ourselves. I had cooked way too much food for all of us, then once they left it was just a ridiculous amount of food and pies. We all got sick of leftovers pretty quickly and Sunday morning I promptly decided to go on a diet!

The only picture I got before our friends left. Ginny and Liam were really getting in to the Star Wars movie we were watching! It was so funny watching these two making all sorts of sound effects!

The last week of November and in to the first week of December was so warm and sunny! It was a nice and welcome change from the dark rainy days, but at the same time it was so strange knowing how much snow and cold was going on in the rest of the country.

Hayden decided it was so warm and sunny so we needed a picnic! 

Ginny thinks the moss is pretty neat too!