Our Amazing November

We had some beautiful days!  Steve was able to get some fun photos at the park.  I absolutely love the one above!  Steve is a great photographer!

At Denny's

Vernal's library

More of Steve's fun photography.  Fast shutter speeds plus Photoshop.

A poem and card Amara made for her dad.  She left it on his pillow with some chocolates she bought at the store.  She knows it's hard for him some times to teach "zombays."

Family home evening is a Monday night tradition at our house.  Amara used a family home evening kit that we bought at last year's ward auction and combined it with her own lesson to create a truly unique lesson.  We each got paper cups with our names on them and they had bubble gum eggs in them.

She made her own activity with questions for each of us to answer.  She folded them up and put them in a tupperware and let us choose a question to answer.

She also drew pictures and had us place them on a paper that had 2 categories: "bad" and "good."  The pictures under the bad category were of "Wine the best in years," Cigarettes, a boy stealing another boy's toy car.  Under the good catergory there were vegetables, and a little girl picking up an apple for the old lady.

I love the drawings and creativity

Amara likes to type out her lesson so she has a script to follow.

For a contest to win a free book, I had to take a picture of how we promote reading in our home, so I shared a few pics of our homeschool room.

Note: Lily did not pose for this picture.  She was actually reading in there when I went to take this pic.

The garden goodness was still being harvested!  Amara has always loved gardening and caring for plants.  Jax our neighbor is the same way and he's such a good boy and a great helper in the garden!

Here's a couple pictures of the girls with their Uncle Matt before he embarked on another adventure to the Orient.

The supermooon happened in November.  Apparently this is the biggest the moon has appeared since 1948.  Steve and I went on a photoshoot!

Steve's final creation of the supermoon.  

The girls took some selfies with a St. Bernard that showed up around our house.  Steve showed the pics to his class and one of the girls mentioned that it was her dog!  So, now we know where to take him when he shows up.  His name is Zeus.

Look at our colorful carrots!  I peeled carrots for almost an hour straight so I could get them ready to preserve.  They're sure pretty.

We shared some bags of carrots with our neighbors.  Carrots keep a really long time in the refrigerator, so I love growing them!

Thanksgiving came around and Jake's family was in Utah for a reunion on Kelli's side.  I'm so grateful they were able to take some time to come hang out with us for a day.  We had an all-day get-together at my dad's church building.  We had food, board games, basketball, coloring, puzzles, visiting, and even kareoke when Trent's family came.

Lookee there!  We have some more writing contest winners!  Our family entered the Uintah County Winter Tales Writing Contest again this year.  Steve took 3rd in poetry.  Lily took 3rd in short story and 2nd in poetry.  And yes, there were cash prizes!

Below are some links to our entries.  We literally threw them all together the day before they were due, except Lily who had a few pieces she had written throughout the year and just made a few revisions.  She did come up with new poetry.  The funny thing is all of us except Steve were not very pleased with the work we were turning in because we could see so much room for improvement, yet there wasn't time for that.  So, it was pretty fun to discover that both Steve and Lily placed!

Steve's Poem: Mysterious Tracks
My short story: Our Newlywed Christmas (based on our true story)
Lily's 3rd Place short story: Wild West Christmas
Lily's poems: It's A Wonderful Life and Today's the Day
Amara's Short Story: Magic