12 Shirts!

Orion has taken to wearing several layers of clothes lately. I think this was his record at 12 shirts! I haven't talked much about his sensory stuff, but he can be both sensory seeking and avoiding in several different ways. Kids like this often enjoy wearing weighted vests, so maybe this is his version!

Great Wolf Decenber 2011

I think I got more pictures on this trip than the last few combined! Ah the joys of having a waterproof camera.

This time at Great Wolf I organized my own group to get the discount. We had just enough families to make it work. It was a fun time as we did lots of room hanging out as well as the other joys of the resort. Did some hanging with Cait and Rachele the first night. Can't remember which one of them gave Akasha these stickers, but she had a great time decorating herself with them lol. This is a neat shot of a picture within a picture!

Akasha really passed some milestones this trip! She has always HATED getting water on her face in the past, but this time she was able to play right in the sprays and even walked through a sheet of water! And she was really into running around in the wave pool, even pretty deep!

Orion spent alot of time in the wave pool as usual as well. :)


As in the following pictures, this would have been unheard of before!


More random cuteness.

The second night, our acrobat boys had a great time jumping from here onto the bed! You can see there are water spots on the camera I forgot to clean off lol.



Whoa, half invisible!


Last day - Ron hit some kind of mega bonus and Orion chose this Airzooka thing.
One of the reasons we wanted to go in December was to see the holiday decor. It was pretty nice!

Oops, breakin' the rules.

"How do you like my new look?"

Somehow this hat, which I bought at KahNeeTa, made its way down from my closet shelf. Actually, I think it fell off when I was rearranging, and my Accessorizer Bunny pounced on it faster than you could say, "Keeps on going." The hilarious thing was that she just kept asking, "How do you like my new look?" She would turn the hat this way and that, pose her body a bit differently, and then ask yet again. What do you think? Does she have a future in fashion?

Honey Honey Honey!

And more honey! A farm in Wilsonville organized a group buy for local honey, and I was the drop off place for several people. I thought it looked gorgeous with the morning light hitting it! And it tastes even better than it looks!

Thanks Be

We had a pretty quiet Thanksgiving, just us and a friend and her son. Ron had originally thought he wanted to go off low carb for the holiday, but then he decided to stick with it. I did make sweet potatoes because I wanted them, but the other things you see below are faux mashed potatoes made with cauliflower and a stuffing made from homemade almond meal bread. It was soooo good! I also made a crockpot version of a green bean casserole that I really liked and a blueberry cobble with coconut topping that was delish!
We made this cute little craft with some friends.
I went for cute and easy with a joint napkin holder/place keeper. All the pictures were really funny ones.
Our gratitude tree...
I got this idea on the Family Fun website, but they did it with foam leaves - imagine! We go for a leaf walk in our neighborhood every year, and then I press them in a book. This year I heard the idea of coating the pressed leaves with mod podge to bring out the colors and make them more durable, and it worked really well. On Thanksgiving, we all said things we were thankful for, wrote them on the leaves and decorated the tree.

Huggy boy after dinner.
The kids had fun blowing otu candles and relighting them for awhile.

This is as close as we get to a family portrait these days.

Getting Ready...

... to go for a November walk.

Family Time

We decided to start trying to spend more time together as a family, since we hardly ever do that. We thought it might be nice to play some games and build a fire and roast marshmallows!


Orion says, "No photos!"Trippy picture of Akasha! She looks partly invisible!
Sticky hands!
Not sure what this face is about!