Thanksgiving

This year for Thanksgiving I stayed in Connecticut (I'm going home in a few weeks for Christmas anyways!) and spent the evening with My favorite Connecticut family ever! It was my first Thanksgiving away from home and it was definitely different! Here are some pictures:

Two hungry kids ready to eat!

The dinner party

Playing my favorite game! Ticket to Ride!!

What a fun day! Very different from my Thanksgivings in the past but still very fun!

Leaf Fight!!!

So two of the boys I nanny for don't know how to ride bikes, so we decided today that we would go to an empty church parking lot and practice for a little bit. Well lucky us Caroline, Connor, Christina, and Casey came too! Here are some pictures of the fun we had at their house afterwards:

Having fun climbing trees

This is a really fun thing to balance on, it takes a bit of practice.

Eventually a huge leaf fight started! They were filling this box up with leaves and then trying to dump them on Caroline, or vice versa.

Connor and Casey working on his pogo stick skills.

Caroline trying to stay out of the line of fire. M has the box full of leaves to throw at her!

Watch out!

Cupcake!

What do I do when I get bored? Make a cupcake... but not just any cupcake, this thing is huge!

Crazy huh?

Statue of Liberty

Look where I went today!!!

Ok so the reason I went to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island today is because my ward planned it as a ward activity. Well I just got put into the activities committee a week ago and I said that I could go this activity so they put me in charge of meeting the group there. Well the facebook group that had invited the ward to the activity only had me as for sure going and then several other maybes, so being afraid I was going to be going alone I took my trusty sidekick Caroline! And guess what, we did do it alone! Two girls did it earlier then the group was supposed to do it and two girls where late, but that's ok Caroline and I had a lot of fun today!

Here we are on the Ferry, we were soooo cold because it was soooo windy!

Here we are listening to our headsets, we did an audio tour and it was really cool because it told us about everything and told us stories about some of the people who had passed through Ellis Island.

The view of New York City from the Statue of Liberty.

Caroline and Lady Liberty

If you ask Caroline what we did today she'll tell you this:

"We woke up at 7, got in the car, got on a train, got on a shuttle, then got on the subway, then got on a Ferry. Then we walked around for a while, got on a ferry, and walked around for even longer. After that we got on a ferry, got on a subway, got on a shuttle, back onto the train, and then into the car..." lots of traveling today!

My Boys!

A couple weeks ago I started a new nanny position and so far I've been having a lot of fun with it. Here's a picture of the three boys I take care of, aren't they sooo cute!

(I'm not going to mention any names or more information, in fact I may have to make my blog private soon to write things about these guys. But we're having fun!)

Volleyball Game

Tonight Caroline and I went and saw a college volleyball game. To make a long story short it's because I'm now friends with my Freshman Volleyball Coach on Facebook and for some reason her daughter is playing volleyball in New York, so her mom told me about her game and told me I should go if I could. It was fun to watch people play good volleyball and fun to introduce Caroline to the best sport in the world!

Roz's Musical Revue

Tonight I went and saw Roz in her musical revue! She was amazing, as always! I love hearing her sing, she is sooo talented! I'm glad that she has opportunities like these to share her talent with all of us.

The kids loved it! Connor waved at his mom every time she was on stage and Christina kept saying "Mommy!" They are all definitely proud of her!

Casey and a couple of her cute kiddos!

Haha Sooooo Funny!

Seeing Katie's Show

Rebecca and I went and saw Katie's show last night and tonight! I love it! Katie does an amazing job and I'm proud to tell people she's my sister! Here's a few of us that went tonight, last night we had even more family there to see it!

Me and Rebecca! I love my big sister! So glad we could be in town at the same time!

SISTERS!

There were three narrators in the play who sang together, here's Katie with one of the other narrators and the boy who played Joseph.

LOVE HER!

Kaitlynn and Jonathan again

More of Jonathan and Kaitlynn, aren't they soooo cute?

Kaitlynn and Jonathan

My nephew Jonathan playing with my neice Kaitlynn. These two hardly ever see each other so it was fun to see them play so well!

My two Kaitlynns!

Going to Arizona means I get to meet my newest niece Kaitlyn! Some of you may be saying, no Kaitlynn is over a year now, who is the baby in this picture? Well it's Kaitlyn, Kaitlynn's baby cousin! Haha confused yet?

Two years ago when my brother Chris and his wife were pregnant they decided that they weren't going to find out what the gender of the baby was, they wanted it to be a surprise. Well when it got down to when they were going to have the baby they were sooooo sure it was going to be a girl, so they only had a girl name picked out, Kaitlyn Marie. Well lo and behold they had a healthy baby BOY! Well a year later my sister Rebecca has a baby girl and not knowing of Chris and Maria's love of the name she named her baby girl Kaitlynn Mae. Well a year later Chris and Maria being pregnant again have a baby girl this time and are now faced with a dilemma, the name they loved is the name of the next oldest grandchild. Well about a week after the baby was born they finally decided, what the heck, and named her Kaitlyn too! Now I have two cute Kaitlynns!

Well Kaitlynn Mae LOVES babies so of course she had to hold baby Kaitlyn!

But then she was done and just tried to push her away, it was soooo funny!

Surprise trip to Arizona!

A couple months ago I learned that my little sister Katie had gotten the part in her high school musical "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" as the narrator, this is the main female lead. I was sooooo excited for her! So my parents, sister, and I decided that it would be really fun to book flights to Arizona so that we could surprise Katie and come and see the show. All of my siblings live in AZ except for me and Rebecca. We both of course told her that we WISH we could come but under the circumstances it just wasn't in our budgets to come, but Katie promised me that when I came home for Christmas she would sing some of the songs for me so that I could hear them!

Well Becca flew in late last night and to keep the secret she stayed at her best friend's families home (only a street away) and I flew in today around noon while Katie was at school. Conveniently Katie needed someone to come pick her up from school around 1:30, right when Rebecca and I were driving home from the airport. So my mom told her that my dad would pick her up because we were driving his car. So when Katie saw the car driving up she started walking towards it. I rolled down my window so that she could see me and she started running and yelled, "You came!" She was soooo happy and surprised! She looked past me at Rebecca who was driving and yelled "You both came!" she hugged me and then ran to Rebecca and by then Katie was crying she was so was happy we were there, Rebecca even started crying too. It was so fun to be able to do something like this for Katie. I always feel bad that I live across the country and I only see her a few times a year. I really wish that I could live out here and still be a really good big sister for her and be there when she needs me. Katie I love you so much and I'm soooo proud of you and everything you're accomplishing!

Maria, we love you!

Look at the fun that Casey and I had today! This weekend is Roz's friend Maria's baby shower and we're making some of the desserts that they're going to have. We were working on these all day! Casey's making little pacifers and I'm frosting rice krispie treats on sticks, they turned out way cute!

Witch Mummy?

Here are all of the great pumpkins we carved (and when I say we I mean Casey and me)

Cool eh?

Casey and I shared a pumpkin, I carved the mummy and she carved a witch, here's a close-up of my side.

Both of ours together, cool huh?! We're basically amazing...