Thanksgiving 2014

This was our year to travel to North Carolina for Thanksgiving with the Miskiewicz family, our very dear friends.  We have spent Thanksgiving together every year since 1997, missing only one year when they went to Kim's mom's house in Kentucky in 2006.  We have a wonderful time every year.

This is the second year Gerren has not been home for Thanksgiving.  Erin and Jeremy missed last year when they were newly married and living in Wisconsin, but they moved back to Raleigh this July.

 On Thanksgiving morning, the game playing began with Matt, Landon, and Chase.

Erin and Jeremy arrived and joined in.

 

Carys watched the Macy's parade while the rest of perused the Black Friday ads in the paper and did some dinner preparation.

 

Around lunch time Kim's nephew and his family arrived.  They were going elsewhere for Thanksgiving dinner but dropped by for a visit.  Their baby Lorraine is 3 now, and they have a new baby.  Carys had a blast playing with Lorraine.

 The both had fun playing with Parker, Erin & Jeremy's dog, in the back yard.

 Landon is patiently waiting for dinner.

Kim took pictures of EVERYONE at the table (there were 19 of us), but I'm just including a few.

Matt's girlfriend Bethany is a new addition to the Meahl/Miskiewicz family Thanksgiving.

Chase LOVES having her picture taken. :)

 

Carys was glad to have another kid there, Jeremy's cousin Jonathan (and his three sisters!).

Landon and Erin

Dave and Greg (you can see where Landon gets the goofy faces)

Kim and Linda (another masterpiece dinner pulled off!)

Carys ADORES Parker!

 

 
Snitching some homemade whipped cream

After dinner, we had an epic game of Mafia.  Actually, it was based on Mafia but was called Werewolf (or something like that)!

I was whipped!

On Friday, we relaxed....

 Played some music....

 

Found a lost dog....

Didn't want to return the lost dog....

Eventually found the owner and had to return the said dog (and cried :( ).

On Saturday, Dave and Greg fixed the loose shutter on the 2nd story.  This was a two-man job since it took a very strong hold on a very tall ladder to even get up on the roof.

Carys read this book to Matt.  I think this is the first time she's read to him instead of the other way around.

On Saturday afternoon I met Michele, one of my online Loopy Friends, in person for the first time.  We had a great time chatting over coffee.

Saturday was parents' night out, as usual.  We had a great meal at The Pit, a Raleigh institution!

 

On Sunday, we went to church with Matt and Bethany while the rest of the family when to their church.  We all met up for lunch at a Mexican restaurant.  We headed for home at 2pm and arrived at 12:15am, about 2 hours later than we should have due to the insane traffic.  Other than that, we had a wonderful time as usual.

Fall 2014

Wow!  It's only been 3-1/2 months since I posted last!  Haha!  What have we been doing?  Well, school mostly.  Greg's been working at his new job at Florida Concrete Construction as a project manager on a Fed Ex distribution center.  He's loving it, and we're lovCring that he's not working nights or weekends at the hotel.  Landon has been working 35ish hours a week at Walgreens.  The girls and I have been doing school.

We have been on a few fun field trips, though.

In early September, Carys and I went to the pool with our Elementary Connections group.

In October, we went to the Coon Hollow Corn Maze.  Chase went along, but this is what she did most of the time.

Carys loved this giant slide!

Carys makes friends everywhere she goes.  This is Aubrey on the hayride.

The cows are well-trained to come and be fed.

 

The tractor pulled this "train" around the farm.

Carys got QUITE a bit cut off her hair.

Chase earned her Mitchell Award in CAP and was promoted to 2nd Lieutenant.

This is the first time I got to pin one of my kiddos!

In November, the girls and I went to a petting zoo with our homeschool group.  They had a blast!

This is Carys and her friend Adeline.

They adored the miniature horses.

Of course, Carys likes horses of all types!

They had goats and bunnies and chickens and CAMELS!

They also had a playground and a bounce house for the kids to play in!

That catches up to Thanksgiving which I'll do in a separate post.  :)

Back to School 2014

Well, the summer is over at our house.  We usually begin our rolling start to the school year on the Monday of the week in which August 1 falls.  However, August 1st was a Friday this year, and I didn't want to start back to school that week. 

Greg came home from Pennsylvania for good that afternoon.  He was gone for our 25th wedding anniversary, July 29.  So, we planned to celebrate when he got home.  Unfortunately, he had to take a safety class for a new job he got that Saturday morning.  So, we really didn't feel like we had time to go away somewhere.  (We ARE thankful for the new job, though!)

We had a staycation anniversary celebration.  After his class Saturday morning, we went to Orlando.  We spent the afternoon shopping at IKEA - Disney World for adults. :)  We had dinner at the Elephant Bar Restaurant, a place that was new to us.  It was good, though not really a place we'd probably go back to.  On the way home that evening, we stopped for dessert at Cracker Barrel.  We decided to hang around Ocala on Sunday.  So, we went grocery shopping at Publix (so much fun, right?) and then out to breakfast at First Watch.  This was another place we'd never been.  Again it was good, but it felt over-priced to us.  Probably not a place we'd go back.  We did a bunch of shopping (Burlington Coat Factory, Best Buy - Chase got a new laptop for school, Home Depot, maybe other places I can't remember).  We decided to see a movie at a historic theater that's been restored in our downtown area.  It's a neat looking place, but there is NO leg room!  We saw And So It Goes and enjoyed it more than we'd expected.  After a little more shopping, we had dinner at Jimmy John's and then headed home.  It was a really fun weekend, even though we didn't go anywhere special.

The next day, August 4, the girls and I started school.  We have two weeks under out belt now, and it'd been going pretty well.  This week, Chase took the U.S. History Part II CLEP test and passed it, earning her very first college credits!!!  Greg started his new job at Florida Concrete on August 4 as well.  He's been hired as a project manager for a job they got on a Fed Ex Warehouse being built in town.  It's a year or so contract.  If they have work for him after that, they'll keep him on.  Otherwise, he'll hopefully have made some connections working on this job so that he'll have other opportunities.  We're grateful that God has provided for us so well since January.

Landon is back living at home.  He decided he would die if he took one more college class.  So, he is not going to graduate school right now.  He got a job at Walgreens in our neighborhood, until he can figure out his long-term plan.  At least he's working.  :)

I'll close this blog post with a picture of the latest tea party at our house!  Aren't they cute?

Heading Home to Florida

On June 30, we spent our last day in Williamsport, PA.  It was Greg's birthday, so we wanted to celebrate with him.  We did some shopping and had a great dinner at Cracker Barrel.

On Tuesday, July 1, Landon, Carys, Chase, and I started the long trip back to Florida.  We stopped for lunch in Virginia, where I finally got to meet my online friend Kristine in person.  We've known each other for more than a decade as we've been part of the same online homeschool group.  Many of us in that group have grown close over the years.  Kristine has been a wonderful friend to me, always remembering to pray for whatever I'm going through at the time and always encouraging me.  It was so great to meet her and her family!

 Kristine got much better pictures, but I put crazy Chase in charge of my camera!  So this is the best one.

Here's what most of Chase's pictures looked like.

Here are Kristine's son, Trevor, Chase, Landon and Carys.  Her daughter Holly doesn't like to have her picture taken.  :)  Trevor, Landon and Chase got along well playing Mario Kart and eating the delicious lunch Kristine and Robert made.

Carys had the best time playing with Kota, the dog, and Robert, the husband!  Haha!

We left Kristine's and headed for the Mitchell's house in Greenville, South Carolina.  We've known the Mitchells since Carys and Rylee were born 8+ years ago.  We always look forward to a chance to visit with them when we can.  They put us up for two nights, and we enjoyed a down day on July 2 swimming in their neighbor's pool, eating subs and going out for frozen yogurt.

Mollianne, Rylee, Carys and Sadie Mae in the pool (not sure if I'm spelling the girls' names right!)

All the kids LOVED the Mitchell's dog, Marley, so much.  They also had cats and bunnies.  Such a fun place to visit. 

On Thursday, July 3, we set off on the final leg of our journey home.  A few hours later, Greg boarded a plane for Tampa.  We got home around 4:30pm.  He got delayed by weather and didn't make it back to the Villages (he takes a transport from the airport to there) until after 9pm.  We had a great trip, but it was good to be home.

Finally, just to get back at Chase for taking all those crazy pictures at Kristine's, I'm posting this one I took of her.  She sat in the front seat for the entire trip, and this is how much help she was to me!