LCA Thanksgiving Program 2015

The holidays are already among us. My kids had their Thanksgiving program last Friday night. They had been practicing so hard for this and their practice paid off. 

After high school sang a song it was time for Kindergarten to their program. Amelia was so excited. All the prior years my boys have always been the Indian. This year I finally had a Pilgrim. She did NOT want to be an Indian like her brothers had been. She made that clear. Ha

They quoted a poem about pilgrims that had motions. Sang a song about Jesus loving the little Pilgrims and Indians. Then they quoted Psalms 100. They did a really good job and it was so cute. 

Now it was time for 1st-8th to do their presentation. 

They presented a musical called Donkey Tales."

Josiah was one of the main characters named Spencer. He was a "city slicker". I was proud of him. He done so good. 

Titus was a member of the Hillbilly band. Maynard fixed him up his instrument. 

He got tickled over something during the play. He played his little heart out on that bass. All of them did good. It was hilarious. I have to say my favorite part was when Bro. Jarvis sang a song at the very end and the hillbilly band accompanied him as well. Ha ha

 They all done a great job!!

I always look forward to their Thanksgiving program. It's one of my favorite things all year. 

A few collages from the prior years. 

Also if you are interested I'll leave a few YouTube links for snippets of their program this year 

http://youtu.be/GoHhtJvWtXY

http://youtu.be/NmhdaVle4y4

LCA Spirit Week

Last week at school was Spirit Week. Every day the students had something to dress up as. They had contests, games, activities, and prizes. 

Well, you know my kids are going to participate. Anything to get out of wearing the regular school uniform sounded good to them. 

For their first day they just had to dress up as a character. Whether it be fictional or nonfictional. 

Amelia said she was going to be Dorothy again so I got her costume washed and ready to wear. Come Monday morning she had changed her mind. She wanted to be a princess instead. 

She decided she wanted to be Pharoh's daughter. I think I heard that there ended up being 3 of those. There was also Miriam and Moses' mother. Hilarious. Of all the bible people they could be and they chose Moses. 

Josiah chose to be a karate boy. He went to school as comfortable as anyone there I'd say. 

Titus was a little more hesitant to dress up. If you remember in my last post he changed out of his DR costume before the fall festival even started. He decided he wasn't going to dress up at all.  So I told him the rule was he had to wear his uniform then. I suggested him wearing his baseball costume. That was a winner for him. 

Tuesday was crazy/whaky day.  I thought it meant just crazy hair day, but apparently that's not what the letter said. There was lots of crazies at school that day. I subbed for Josiah's class so I got to see everyone in costume that day. I loved seeing all the participation. 

Used a water bottle to fix Amelia's hair. She crushed the bottle trying to get out of the car at school. I never cud get it to straighten up after that.

 This kid though. He definitely looked crazy. 

Titus wore his favorite T-shirt and I gave him a shaving cream Mohawk. (He ended up having an asthma attack later that night from everything I put in his hair to get it to look crazy.  Plus kids at school were spraying hair color on their hair and it made the whole school smell.) oh!  And this was immediately after I got home from ER with Josiah after he slammed the van door on his hand and almost broke his hand. I didn't want to have to go back to ER. After trying several things to help him, I gave him a breathing treatment. If that didn't help I was gonna have to take him, but he got better afterwards. 

Class representatives. As you can see, Amelia's hair didn't last, but Abby rocked hers all day. 

Moving on to Wednesday.....

Wednesday was old fashioned days. It could be any historical time. 

Well, when you have more than one princess costume you just do what you have to do. She decided to be a queen this day. So I told her she could be Queen Elizabeth. She loved that until I showed her a picture of her. 

"Mom!  She's so old!!!"

"Yes she is, but she's also the longest reigning queen."

"Does she still dance in the rain?"

"Ummm...Do what?" Ha ha ha

Apparently Amelia thinks Queens dance in the rain as part of their job. No wonder she wants to marry into royalty. 

Titus chose to dress up in Western gear. He liked this one about as good as the baseball costume. 

Josiah couldn't make up his mind what he wanted to be. He wanted to be a president, but he didn't know which one. He ended up deciding that he just wanted to be Billy Sunday instead. 

Thursday was throw back Thursday. They had to dress up as a family member in the past. I drug out my memorabilia box and found a few things for the kids to wear if they wanted too. 

Amelia wore my project grad shirt and my school jacket. She even tied the end of her T-shirt up like I used to do 20 yrs ago. I didn't have time nor the heart to curl, tease and poof her hair so I just put it in a French braid. 

Titus wore my senior Shirt and sweatshirt. It was blue so a boy or girl could wear it. 

Josiah wanted to dress up as Maynard, but we really didn't know what to do since he didn't have any memorabilia type things for him to wear. I remembered that I had my old Harper's Electronic shirt he could wear. So we quickly put together  a "Don Harper" outfit for him to wear.  

He looked perfect. This boy looked just like his papaw. All he needed was glasses and a Veteran's cap.  

Friday was School Spirit day. They could wear their school logo shirts or wear school colors. Poor Amelia didn't have a school shirt yet so she had to wear red, white, and blue. 

The night before she worked hard on her poster for the poster contest. She was super proud of herself. 

She did have some help, but everything was her idea. We just helped as needed. 

This was Josiah's poster he made at school. 

Titus didn't show interest in doing one, but his class all made one together. I didn't get a picture though. 

Friday morning they each got dressed and then gave me special orders for face painting. 

Can you tell these kiddos had a blast?!?!

It's good to have routine and structure, but sometimes it's also good to just change things up a bit. 

We are thankful for LCA and was proud to show our school spirit. 

Titus celebrates 8th Birthday at Fall Fest and McCloud Mt.

Boy did this child ever have a busy, busy Birthday. I still haven't fully recooperated. Titus' birthday was Friday, October 30th. That same night we were having a Fall festival at church. I didn't plan a party for him because there was no way a birthday party could compare to our fall festival we had planned. 

I had helped work on getting the fall festival together.  So I had spent several days at church, with others, to help get things ready. I was exhausted Friday morning, on his birthday. He had asked that Maynard wake him up early, before he left for work, so he could open his present. Maynard tried waking me around 5:45 a.m., but I just couldn't get up so Maynard went ahead and left for work. 

Around 7 I heard Titus going through the house looking for his Daddy. He was upset that he wasn't there. So I decided to throw Maynard under the bus, and told him "Daddy must not have wanted to wake you up that early." Lol. So we let Titus open his present while we had Daddy on the phone. 

He was excited to get a tablet just like Josiah had gotten for his birthday. I just realized the box was upside down in this picture. Lol

I had offered to take them to McDonalds for breakfast, but Titus wanted pancakes with a candle in it. Just like Josiah had. He was disappointed because his candles weren't trick candles like Josiah had. Oh good grief. I can never be one step ahead with these kids. 

I had planned on being at school all day that day to work on Fall Fest stuff so I told him I would bring him McDonalds for lunch. He asked for 8 breakfast burritos because he was 8 now. Ha ha. That kid loves him some breakfast burritos.

I dropped the kids off at school and picked up Titus a camo birthday balloon and a candy apple I had ordered for him. I took it to him and he smiled so big. I could kick myself for not remembering to get his picture with it. 

Here's what the apple looked like. He shared a bite with me and it was delicious. 

At lunch I brought the kids McDonalds to school. 

Titus told me thanks for making his day so much more special. I just love him. 

So after lunch Kayla, Heather, and I had to get busy and get this fall festival ready to go. Birthday was on hold and my focus was switched to Fall Fest. 

The kids could dress up if they wanted and Josiah and Amelia did. Titus dressed up as a doctor, but then got embarrassed and changed before it even started. 

She was so excited to be Dorothy. She was so ragged out that I called her Orphan Dorothy. 

Josiah was dressed up as a Mad Scientist. 

He's a nut. Lol

One of our biggest complaints was we didn't get many pictures. We worked so hard and was so busy we couldn't get around to taking pictures. I only got a few and a few people sent me what they had taken. 

Here's a few pics of my pre-school area. 

This game was a whole lot of work. Super cute and the little kiddos loved it. 

It's supposed to be a pumpkin, but it got a little lopsided in the making. Each cup had a napkin over it and you just poked a hole through it and grabbed the prize. 

There was always a crowd of littles playing in the water at the duck pond. 

Pick a Pop was a fun pre-school game too. Choose a sucker. If it had a black dot on the end you won the sucker and a prize. If no dot then you just won the sucker.  Little pre-schoolers don't really like losing so we tried to make it easy on them. 

Ring toss was originally intended for Pre-schoolers as well, but when the word got out that you won the koolaide, we drew lots of crowds of all ages. 

 As you can see, teens even wanted a chance to win a koolaide. At one point I had like 6 teen boys trying over and over to win one. It was hilarious. 

I stayed so busy in my corner that I didn't get pics of anything else. Maynard was in his corner with his booth. He re-created the game Grand Prize game on the old Bozo the Clown show. Every time I glanced at him he always had a huge long line. I don't think he ever had a break in line. 

We had several more booths up such as fish toss, football, basket ball, seek and find, photo booth, cake walk, pie-face, donut on a string relay,  2 inflatables, hayrides, and more. 

For refreshments we served chilli, hot dogs, popcorn, caramel popcorn, and funnel cakes. 

A big shout out to our kitchen helpers. They stayed so busy and worked hard the whole time as well as us working directly with the children. 

We had about 30 mins left of the night and we still had a ton of candy and prizes left. We decided to have a candy throw like we did at Kids Crusade. It was probably the highlight of all the kid's night. It was amazing to see that amount of candy being thrown out to all them kids. 

I had ran into an amazing deal at the Family Dollar store earlier that week. I was able to buy tons of prizes and even balls for a total of $25. They had 90% off their clearance and I racked up. Our church members provided all the candy and there was an abundance of it. The prizes were also nice to have in addition to all the candy. 

I wish I had gotten a picture of all the candy we had. We filled a huge tin washtub up with candy and still couldn't fit it all in there. 

Do you understand now why a birthday party for Titus would never even compare to that???  At the very end, our associate pastor led the crowd in singing Happy Birthday to Titus. It was really sweet and special. 

Another exciting part of Titus' birthday was that we had family come in. Each fall our family tries to get together and do something. Usually we go camping, but this year it was too cold to camp. We ended up with 16 "Harper" family coming to visit. They also had a blast at our fall fest. It was good to see them have fun even though I was so busy and couldn't really visit with them just yet. 

We stayed late and cleaned up and went home and crashed. We had plans early the next morning. Titus bday celebrations continued. 

We had reservations for a party of 21 at McCloud Mountain in Tennessee.  Titus agreed to celebrating his bday there. Plus, I just knew my family was gonna love it. We were not disappointed. It was gorgeous. A bit chilly, but beautiful. 

When we arrived at the restaraunt, we tried taking pictures of our view from the table, but it was really dark inside. We did get a few okay ones. 

Titus got to enjoy dessert for his Birthday. 

After our meal we headed out to take in the scenery and take some pictures. 

We were all laughing in this picture because they were telling Maynard to keep scooting back. Maynard was acting like he was gonna fall off the ledge. 

You would think this was the end to all of the partying, but nope!!

We left Tennessee and headed back to our church for cake and ice-cream. 

This was impromptu so nothing was decorated. The restaraunt wouldn't allow me to bring his cake inside. Bummer, but we made the best of it. 

After cake and ice-cream, Mamaw invited the kids to their motel room to swim with their cousins. 

After they swam a couple of hours, we brought Kamden home with us for a sleepover and pizza. 

We kept them so busy that they never really realized that it was Halloween. They had no idea what they were missing and had just as much as fun as the kids who did go trick or treating. 

What a fun weekend we had. Everyone had a great time and we got to celebrate 8 years of Titus Luke!!!  He has brought so much joy to our lives. 

Happy 8th Birthday, Titus.