Turkey day

Thanksgiving 2007 at a glance: Turkey cookies and zucchini with feta cheese,

Cute boys playing together and eating their fill,

Time with Grandpa and Grandma making memories,

Spending time together as a family enjoying each other's company,

Laughing, having fun and just being sisters. (See the next post below...)

We are so grateful for our many many blessings HAPPY THANKSGIVING from the Burch's!!!

What?!?!

Okay so on a wild hair after Thanksgiving dinner we decided to join the madness of "Black Friday" and head to the mall. We put the kids and Deke to bed and the girls and I headed to Arrowhead mall at about 12:30 a.m. The stores opened up anywhere from one o'clock to six o'clock. When we first arrived there the mall looked like this:

By one o'clock it was hoppin. The disney store had a line starting from the store all the way five stores down and people were filling it up. The store didn't open until three o'clock but these people were seriously hardcore about disney items and had been there since about eleven. I pondered if there was anything in the disney store that I would be willing to wait pretty much all night for sitting outside on tile in a mall waiting only for the doors to open and be trampled by all the crazed moms trying to get gifts for their kids. I decided that there definitely wasn't. After about an hour we decided to leave the mall empty handed but glad that we had taken time to reaffirm that shopping on this day was really not that worth it. As we headed home we went past Best Buy and my jaw hit the ground. People lined up from one end of the large strip mall all the way through it to the other end where the Best Buy was. Tents, air mattresses, people with blankets sitting in folding chairs playing cards. I guess there is also an appeal for the experience not just the sales. I know there has to be some item that I would be willing to take such measures to obtain but so far I really have not been able to think of a single one. However today on Saturday we did go by Kohl's and find two thanksgiving bowls and a beautiful platter all for like four dollars. I am definitely a girl who shops the sales and likes good deals but if you look you can find amazing deals all year long. Stores but a sign up in the window saying SALE and people come in throngs. Did anyone hear about the lady who almost got trampled by a rushing crowd yesterday as they opened the store doors?? Yeah definitely not something worth risking your life over or even in my opinion losing sleep for. The upside: time with the girls which is always a blast and just another fun memory made with them. Love you girls!!!

Okay, here it is...

I have been tagged and so everyone here you go here are six things you might not know about me:

1) I hate metal. I hate the smell of it, I hate how dirty it is. I don't like to touch the keys so if I have to use them to open the door I have to wash my hands right after I do. If I am leaving the house then I have to use a wet wipe or else I will think about the metal on my hands all the way until I get to a sink to wash. I will never carry change around, even the thought of holding it in my hands grosses me out. The smell of the metal on my kids hands after they swing on a swing, disgusting. I absolutely hate it, a little OCD I know.

2) I love rice krispy treats. I can eat a whole 9X11 pan by myself. They are probably one of my favorite snacks.

3) I am obsessed with germs on my pillowcase. I am the owner of more pillowcases then I can count. I put a pillowcase on one night, then turn it inside out the next night, and then it is time for a fresh one. If all pillowcases are dirty I will use one of Deke's clean t-shirts as a substitute or else it will drive me crazy. I have been given pillowcases for a gift before. Deke lovingly supports this problem and will change my pillowcase for me if he gets in bed before I do. Okay sorry another very OCD tendency.

4) I have a strange skill at memorizing numbers. I have our socials, my driver's license, water bill account numbers (actually all account numbers), old addresses and phone numbers from childhood, customer service phone numbers for our accounts etc. etc.

5) I won't eat any blue foods that would change my tongue, mouth and or teeth blue. Some of these foods include: Popsicles, suckers, kool aide, and M&M's. I will also not distribute any of these blue foods to my children. To see someone with a blue tongue or tinted blue teeth again grosses me out and I am really not sure why on this one.

6) I wanted to be an anchorwoman for a news station as my career choice. I actually started out as a journalism major at MCC and then realized that if I wanted kids that it would be a difficult career choice. I still think about it and would have loved the opportunity to work in that field I still have an interest in it. As a kid I used to love to borrow the video camera and put on mock newscasts with my sisters and friends.

Well now that we have established that I am a rice krispy loving, germaphobe with multiple OCD tendencies who became a teacher and secretly wishes to be working at channel 12, memorization wiz let me tell you a few other things...

* I may be OCD about a lot of things but I never iron, my side of the closet is always a mess and I love touching slimy things like the inside of the pumpkin at Halloween. I remember numbers but I am bad at Math and consider eating a blue M&M every now and again. Whew! Well that's all folks probably more than you ever cared to know :) :) Check the post below for pics of the kids, they are much more interesting.

These two

Well Hunter and Avery are really starting to play together a lot instead of just next to each other. Tonight they were in the laundry room playing and I caught a few shots of them being silly. It made me smile when I realized two things 1) they are having a lot of fun together just playing 2) I think that I can count on one hand how many times I have seen a picture of Avery without out some type of bow or band on her head. They are so cute!

Rusty

This is Rusty.

Hunter was never a pacifier baby or a thumb sucker. He never carried a favorite blanket around with him. However, this kid loves his stuffed puppy that he named "Rusty." Hunter was eighteen months old when he got Rusty as a present. We had tried to give him an incredibly soft teddy bear, a cute little stuffed elephant, and even made him a "build a bear" (Smasher) which he liked a lot but nothing compared to Rusty. He would carry Rusty with one arm under his neck and pack him around wherever we went. He would scratch his ears and talk to him, "Hey Rust, hey there puppy." He would hug him and kiss him and always had to have him to sleep next to him. Well that was then, this is now at four...

Yes, that's right, nothing has changed my friends. He still packs Rusty around everywhere he goes. The poor dogs neck is so stretched out that there isn't even any stuffing in it anymore and he resembles a giraffe more than a dog. His fur is all matted and he looks so scruffy. The tag says only surface wash but I admit it, I toss him in for a spin every now and then since he gets dragged around everywhere. The worst part of this whole thing is that Rusty is like a one of a kind. He is not a build a bear animal that we can just go replace at the mall. We have never seen another one just like him. So please let us never leave him at a store, lose him on a trip, or have him fall apart where he can't be repaired. We are just going to continue to watch Hunter enjoy him and love on him. The other day we went to the park and he got out of the car with Rusty in tow and headed for the playground. He carried Rusty around with him as he played with the other kids and older boys and wasn't embarrassed at all to be carrying around a stuffed animal. I smiled as I watched him because I know that someday all too soon that will go away. He will still love Rusty but it will no longer be "cool" to carry a stuffed animal around. So for now I watch him with his little arm around his neck introducing Rusty to his friends and feel grateful for his childlike love and innocence. I am soaking up every moment of him "still being little" and love that even at four when I see this... he is still my baby.

Avery

Well Avery is quite the busy little one these days. She is starting to jabber up a storm, eats all day anytime, and is taking six to seven steps by herself. One of her favorite things right now is a little push toy that she can push around the house, she absolutely loves it, the other is the remote. Here is some video of her pushing it and some random shots of her in the last little while. It is so weird to me how all of a sudden their little faces lose that baby look and start to look older. It just goes by so fast.

Pictures and Pictures of Pirates

Well Hunter upon much much deliberation finally decided upon a pirate costume. After he decided to be a pirate we found a cute baby girl pirate costume at Target for Avery. Deke and I on the spur of the moment, hit up Goodwill and put our costumes together for only $20 with boots and everything. It was so much fun for us and for the kids to dress up as a family of pirates. Today we took a whole bunch of fun pictures in the backyard. Beware, Deke and I found a tripod and had a lot of fun taking pictures together in our costumes as seen below: Deke kills me with his facial expressions they are awesome don't you agree? Is is bad that I really liked the boots and am now wanting to buy an actual pair of dressy boots to wear?? Or should we be more concerned about how much Deke liked me in the boots?? :) :) Anyways, Deke and I love taking fun pictures and had fun with our little photo shoot. I added another post below with pics from some of our fun Halloween activities, hope everyone had a fun week.

Halloween Preparations

Well starting last Friday we kicked off a week of Halloween related activities and fun. We have been celebrating all month but last week we really kicked it into gear. We went to a little pumpkin patch and picked a pumpkin which Avery was actually very fascinated with.

We spent a night at Peoria sports complex Monster Bash and balloon illumination. It was a lot of fun, they had a lot of different activities. There were carnival games, hot air balloons, slime making, mask decorating, and costume parades.
Probably my favorite activity was some of the fun snacks and treats that we made to celebrate the season. A few of them included skeleton pizza, ghost pancakes, and brain and eyeball cupcakes..YUM

Halloween day Hunter came to work with me all day in costume. We went trick or treating that night with Grandpa and Grandma McWhorter and Alec. Hunter got a ton of candy and Avery just rode along in the stroller happy as can be. Hope everyone had a HAPPY HALLOWEEN!