Be thankful for this post-holiday recap

Hello loyal blog followers!

I'm horrible. I'm finding it harder and harder to sit down and download photos and write posts when I'm carried away in normal day to day. Here is the Cliff Notes version of what we've been up to lately and how we've been getting in the holiday spirit.

The weekend before Thanksgiving the kids and I got carried away to the land of sugar plums and dew drops at the Tallahassee Ballet's annual Kingdom of Sweets event.

Jack has become quite the little photog.

Any doubt these two are related?

While we stood in the (endlessly) long face painting line, the kids entertained themselves with balloons, tree climbing and watch the mini performance.

Jack wanted to be the mouse king, but he wasn't too pleased that his face lacked "mean eyebrows", thus his look of utter disgust in this photo. In the car, I added mean eyebrows with a black eyeliner pencil and his mood turned around.

For the kids' classroom Thanksgiving festivities, I made these turkey sugar cookies that I copied from another blog on Pinterest.

I modified them a bit from the original blog and used pretzel M&M's for the face with a candy decorating pen.

Aren't they so unbelievably adorable?! I just can't get enough photos of these cute little guys.

And another Pinterest find were these pilgrim hats.

Made from fudge stripe cookies and Reese's peanut butter cups and a little peanut butter frosting as "glue".

I helped Jack's teacher that morning get the classroom decorated. It was really cute and colorful with all of the kids crafts set out on the tables.

Jack (the photog) had to go around taking everyone's picture in his classroom. I had to edit out the blurry ones.

Paige was just as excited about her school's festivities. We took her friends another batch of the turkey cookies individually wrapped for them to take home and enjoy with cute favor tags.

Each year, they tell the kids the story of stone soup. The kids add their can of food to the soup pot. Then they sing festive songs for the parents and we eat a lunch of stone soup.

Paigey loved her stone soup, which is mainly veggie soup.

The kids were both my little helpers on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It was nice having them both home (and not leaving home) for my baking frenzy. Am so thankful for these precious babies!

On Thanksgiving Day most people wake up and cook, or watch the parade on TV or relax. Apparently, I was never aware, but a pretty good amount of the population get up and go run. Our local Turkey Trot drew out over 5,000 people to run in the 1 mile fun run, 5K, 10K and 15K. Nancy and I upped our game and went for the 10K. We weren't looking forward to it by any means, but the cool, crisp morning couldn't have been a more perfect day for a 6.2 mile run. We both felt good for the entire run and most importantly we crossed the threshold from the 5K to 10K and are well on our training way to the half.

We are now 12 weeks from the big race and even though we've almost run half of the half, it's still daunting. God help us over these next 12 weeks!

That takes us up to Thanksgiving. Promise I'll be back soon with how it is starting to look a lot like Christmas around here.