November: Thankful, Grateful, Blessed!

Feast of All Saints! Lucy and the other Mary's from her class and Rosie & G.

Apart from All Saints, we started off November with the end of the "most wonderful time of the year" which for me is not Christmas but football season. The FGR Football Banquet was at Fox Hills and we got to take Finn on one of his first post-injury outings.

Mateo and Stephan are the JV kick return guys (above), below is the main freshman table at the banquet

Sophomore Finn with mostly juniors (I think?)

While the O'Meara's were in Europe, we also got the opportunity to take our injured Finn on another outing to watch the playoff game. The team even gave him "honorary" captain status for the coinflip!

Obviously we squeezed in some visits to see Rosie & G.

And for one UM away game, with Finn injured, we got to hang out with the O'Meara's that didn't travel to Chicago for the game.

And then the same night as the FGR gala at St John's Inn, Nate's twin sister, Amanda, got married at another part of the same venue! So I got to work check-in, check-out and see them briefly on their quick visit home from Ireland for that wedding.

We got to spend the night with the Ekblads over the retreat weekend when all older Ekblads were in Dewitt for that. 4 kids and 3 dogs and thank God for Buddy who held down the whole fort and I was just a semi-functional adult with a driver's license in case of emergency!

We went to visit O'Meara's for a bit to enjoy the new play structure and extra nice weather :)

HVCS Lunch Duty almost never disappoints. For the staff Thanksgiving I signed up for 2nd grade!

I put up Halloween decorations so late, I had to turn them into All Saints decor!

Wicked for Good with the goodest, Mary Gentit

It's not a hairshirt, but in a spirit of self-sacrificial love, I even "offered it up" and took them to my least favorite place: Sephora. God be with me.

One last stop for Chick-fil-A before returning our favorite Gentit to her birth family.

Lucy and I hit up "Presence Night" at FGR and then went out to the condo to see Tomas get within yards of scoring! Ding dang "injury clock run-off" prevented me from losing my complete shiz and him from scoring.

Thanksgiving with Grandma Paula! It was Maria's holiday to work, Carmen & Nate were in Ireland and with Isabel & Noah getting married the next weekend, none of the "bigs" could make it unfortunately!

Maria did manage to get over to the DeVries function after work though!

Isabel & Noah met at college, through their roommate, sophomore year and are about 5 years apart in age...just like another couple I know...

Aunt Maeve set us up with a wonderful post-Thanksgiving long weekend in Cincy! Mom and Dad even overlapped with us for a day or two. There was lots of forced family fun and food as always :)

While UM lost, Maeve & I decided to still be "good sports" and drove out shots to the same house we had delivered to two years earlier when we smoked OSU!

Aaron with some neighbors, they have such amazing friends in their neighborhood...even if they are OSU fans.