Just follow the blue dot...

Um, so Christmas is next week. And I am just now talking about Thanksgiving...oh well.

The week of Thanksgiving we took our first road trip as a family of four. I was very nervous about traveling with two -- 1000 miles is a long way for anyone, much less the littlest ones! But luckily we have been blessed with great traveling children -- I guess if we're going to live so far away at least everyone travels well. :)

Along the way Will noticed that Todd and I kept checking the GPS maps on our phones and wanted to know what it was. We showed him how there is a green dot where you start, a red one where you finish, and the blue dot is where you are currently. He became fascinated with the dots the rest of the trip. When he was hanging out with his friend Brody in Kansas City he asked him if he wanted to come over to his house. Then he preceded to tell Brody -- "you can come over, just tell your dad to follow the blue dot." :) We did a LOT of car traveling that week -- stopping in Kansas City, Omaha, Farnam, back to Omaha, Dallas, and then home. But the kids were troopers and all we heard from Will was, "where is the red dot today???"

It was a great trip -- we were able to see so many people and Will always has such a good time. Here he is checking out the tractors...



Thanksgiving day we were in Farnam at the annual Bellamy family luncheon. It was great to get to see so many people in one place and give Will an opportunity to have some quality time with the rough and tumble Bellamy boys. At one point he came in with grass in his hair and dirt in his teeth SO proud of himself! A little tackle football among the under 10 group never hurt anyone, right??

In the meantime, the little lady was busy trying out peas for the first time...Thanksgiving seemed like an appropriate day to give solid foods a chance. :)



And it wouldn't be Thanksgiving in Nebraska without a little football watching...go Huskers!



Every year the Friday after Thanksgiving the shopping area by Jess's house has a great Christmas parade. We decided to go and check it out this year and enjoy a little time with Uncle Bob and the crew. It was a little rainy and a little cold, but not too shabby for this time of year. It was Will's first experience with fireworks and his expressions were priceless!





During some of our many hours in the car I got the brilliant idea to play a thankful abc game. We would each come up with things we were thankful for that started with different letters and I kept track of them on my phone. It's funny to think back to what we said and how it was definitely a testament to how the trip was going. There were times that Will was thankful for airplanes...probably definitely ready to get out of the car (around the same time Todd said he was thankful for alcohol...) Most of the time he was thankful for whatever animal he could think of or the names of his friends we had just seen or he missed from school. But he was also thankful for Daddy -- as we all were as he drove us across the country. :) It was wonderful to get to spend time with so many people that we love and we look forward to next time -- but ready for people to come to us!