We had a wonderful Thanksgiving! It was the first time that we had hosted the Thanksgiving dinner. We invited our neighbors (The Herreras) who just had their first baby and my cousin Brittany and her husband. We split the meal between all of us which made it so much easier and cheaper. I was just relieved that I didn't have to cook the turkey. I do not like to cook meat. for some reason whenever I cook meat, I get really turned off to it and then I can't enjoy eating it. The only meats I can stand to cook are hot dogs and ground turkey so these are the only meats we eat in our home. Anyways, I was grateful not to be turned off to turkey on Thanksgiving. I mostly handled the pies which are my favorite thing to make. I did an apple, a cherry and two pumpkin pies. They were fun to make but it was a little different experience baking them. This year I tried a new pie crust recipe that had a ridiculous amount of butter in it but I didn't question it because it's pie crust, right?  well, whether it was the right amount or not, when I put the pies in the oven to bake on Thanksgiving morning, the butter in the crust melted and dripped off the pie like rain. In no time, the oven was pouring out smoke and we were opening all the doors and windows fanning out the smoke in an attempt to keep the fire alarm quiet. We put pans under the pies to catch the butter but it didn't stop the smoking. The  pies needed to finish baking though, so we endured the smoke and cold for a couple of hours till they were all done. I've never had that problem with pie crust before. In the end the crust was super flaky but I can't say it was worth the bottom of our oven getting coated with burnt butter. Oh well, live and learn. All the food was good though and we had a fun time with friends and family eating, talking and playing games.

This year, I have so much to be grateful for. I have everything I want and everything I need. Of course I am grateful for my beautiful boys and sweet husband but I would particularly like to focus on our situation that I am grateful for. Since we have moved back to Rexburg, it's been a learning experience for me and has helped me to discover my misplaced faith. Like everybody else, we don't got a very cushy bank account and because this year we just had our third son and a couple of other factors, I was very very stressed out. I was stressed to the point of not enjoying my family or life. I hated the feeling and wanted to change. Money was always on my mind and I hated thinking about money. I didn't want to think about money while I was in the hospital with our brand new son. Over time, I realized that my thinking had to change if I wanted to be happy again, more particularly what I thought about faith. Faith was something I could define but I discovered it was something I hadn't made a habit of practicing. The truth was, I was so scared and stressed because my faith was in money more than in God. I believed money would take care of us and supply our needs, not God. In other words, I trusted in the arm of flesh. I trusted in something finite and man made when what I should have been trusting in was something everlasting and eternal and that would never fail. No wonder I was so afraid. I truly saw how weak my faith was. God knew it too because for weeks it seemed like every lesson and talk in church was about putting our faith in God. He was trying to help me not be afraid. I started to focus on faith and try to find out more about it through the scriptures. Our bank account continued to shrink but I could feel my faith in the Lord growing as I learned to shift my faith from our money to the Lord. I slowly became less and less afraid and now I can say with gratitude that I am once again loving my life and having fun with my boys again. Life is happy once more and it's not because we have more money. I'm not saying my faith is perfect, but more that it is headed in the right direction now and I know that life will only get better the more I nurture it. I see now that if we weren't poor like we are, I wouldn't have been able to see this and redirect myself. God really does work in mysterious ways and I am so grateful for this opportunity to be poor and rely on the Lord for our necessities. He truly is our provider and the Founder of the feast during this Thanksgiving season.

 Voila, the setting for the feast. We got the leaf for our table so that we could fit more people at it. Of course I forgot to actually take a picture when everybody finally came and we were all together, so all I have to preserve this Thanksgiving memory is an empty table..... but at least its a clean empty table?

 Christmas decor