November Happenings

I see it's been a month since I last posted....mostly I have quite a few photos, so I'll just put photos and captions to get us up to date:

Emily ate with chopsticks for the first time in early November. We went to PF Changs and she was able to use the chopsticks all by herself with the little chopstick holder thingy. She also used her fingers a lot, but we were very proud. She also found a statue of her favorite horse, Sahara, outside of the restaurant. It was "really big"!

We spent Thanksgiving with Kevin's family this year. Most of my family (except Marianne, who we were very happy to have visit us!) went to UT to see the extended family. We had a great meal and Marianne and I managed to sneak out by ourselves in the evening and go see "Enchanted". It was a cute movie. And I made my very first pies - pumpkin and banana cream - using my own homemade pie crust. The crust turned out probably twice as thick as normal (it's hard to roll it out thin!) but it tasted really yummy. At least I thought so.
The day after Thanksgiving we drove down to Marianne's place in San Luis Obispo and spent a day and a half there. We went to Avila Beach, where I haven't been before, and they had this really fun playground right by the beach. Emily of course decided she would rather play there than on the actual beach, so we hung out there for a while.


Emily didn't want to cooperate for any photos, of course... she dug in the sand (in the park, not the beach) and wasn't too disappointed that her sand castles didn't hold their form when she dumped them out.

Isn't Marianne cute?! Avila Beach has some little shops and stuff and we found a gelato shop and had a treat there. Then we saw a wedding on the beach! Marianne and I thought their color scheme - light sage green and cream - was just beautiful, and they did it so simply just with everyone standing there on the sand. It was kind of neat to see.

The above photo needs some explanation...We've been trying to have more regular family home evenings, and now when we say we are going to have the lesson Emily wants to give her own lesson. This particular evening we had Kevin's brothers over and Kevin gave a nice lesson that Emily chose not to attend. She was being very disruptive so she had to go to her room until she could be more reverent, but then she decided she needed to give her own lesson about Snow White and the evil queen. She was already dressed up in her princess costume, but she got some scriptures to help her (the dark red book on the left), plus her photos from Disneyland and a Snow White story book. She would not talk until we were ALL listening attentively, then she proceeded to give us a five-minute talk about Snow White and the queen and the poison apple and all that. It was quite funny because she was so serious about it and especially about us listening quietly. We try to get her to understand that she needs to listen to us and then we will also listen to her, but she just wants us to listen to her and then does her own thing when we are talking. Yep, she's three.