The Giving Part of Thanksgiving

I just CAN NOT STAND IT, this kid is the coolest! And so incredibly precious!!! So I just had to start off with a photo of our big 2 (and 1 month) year old!!!
Now on to this week's post :)

We've started a new family tradition, to concentrate on the "giving" part of Thanksgiving the week prior. So, this week we made a meal for a friend in need... adopted a needy family in the area with our small group that we will provide Thanksgiving dinner for... and put together a shoebox full of gifts for The Samaratin Purse's Operation Christmas Child. We want to show God's love to others, honor Him, and teach Benjamin these same traits. He really got into the spirit of things. We had been reading the story of the little boy who shared his lunch-that Jesus gave thanks to God for-and then performed a miracle in using those 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish to feed 5000 people, with some left over! Ben was able to tell it to us, with very little prompting tonight. He's memorized his third Bible verse, "give thanks to God"! And he was really excited to apply the lesson in the story to making bread Friday night that we shared with friends during our fondue dinner club party on Saturday. He is developing such a heart for the Lord even at this young age, which is our biggest prayer for him. And we couldn't pass up the oh so cute turkey hand print and foot print art projects! Here are a few pics of some of those events!

In other news, Marc is officially an evaluator pilot now, having conducted his first official student evaluation and being signed off by the Squadron Commander himself. We're so proud of him! Benjamin is working on his authoring skills in his first book - Benjamin's ABCs, it rocks! And Jaimee is training for her first post-becoming-a-mommy 5K.

We'll be back to share a special Thanksgiving post soon!

love,

MJB