Tuesday, November 29, 2011

{more leaves, Parade Company Tour and Thanksgiving}

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This, I promise you, is the very last of the leaf pictures. Or is it leaves pictures? Ummm, no. That is definitely not correct.  Leaf pictures it is. Whew. Glad we got that straight.

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It was a good year for frolicking in the leaves. Best year yet. Although, last year would have been good too if our leaf pile didn't suddenly disappear one day by a well-intentioned leaf removing neighbor. I think they now know that we are leaf pile addicts and will leave our leaves alone. That was way to fun to say.

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A couple weeks ago my Dad and Natalie treated us to a lovely afternoon tour of the Parade Company. If you live in this area and have never been, you should go. You get to see a backstage tour of all the floats used in the America's Thanksgiving Day Parade here in Detroit. It's really interesting. The girls really enjoyed seeing all those floats up close and personal. And they enjoyed watching the parade on Thanksgiving morning - "Mom!! That's the one we saw on the tour!!"

Each float is sponsored by a company, who commissions the Parade Company to design and build it. It's the only parade that does this. Unique and very cool.  And while I really enjoyed hearing about all the floats, I retained very little....The float below is one that has to do with reading. I just really liked the fairy.
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This is a picture inside the HUGE warehouse. See Elmo? I do remember that this one was sponsored by PNC bank. See, I was listening!
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Wizard of Oz - and some Big Heads on the wall. Apparently, you pay around $300 to wear one of these big heads and march in the parade. There's all kinds...including Tom Selleck. We saw him in another part of the tour.
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The Ford float.
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The float that Santa used to ride on.
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The cheese wall. This is where they make the costumes. How would you like to have a cheese wall in your office - where people just look at you? I know, AWESOME, right?
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My Dad and the girls. I don't know why he's standing so far away from them....I did shower them right before we left....
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And the big hit of the day - we all got clown noses when the tour was over. The funny hats stayed in the gift shop.
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And then we will move on to Thanksgiving. It was a lovely affair this year. We had 18 people. Eric's mom came to stay with us this year, rounding out our group. We had our usual shenanigans during dinner - with WAY more potty humor than most people could tolerate. But we are not most people. And let's just say that there are some things about some people that I now wish I never knew. (Yes, Kelly, I am talking about YOU.)
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The crazy picture below...umm, Kelly, what are you doing?
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I think I love this one the best.
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And finally, one of my girls walking home from the bus stop.
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I think we are all caught up now!

Thursday, November 17, 2011

{instagram love}

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I really love the Instagram app on my phone. It's a cool way to capture everyday moments. Here's a sampling of my Instagram photos from the past month or two...as you can see, I like to take pictures of Autumn. It's just so preeeeetttty!


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Monday, November 7, 2011

{jumping in the leaves}

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Every fall we look forward to raking up our leaves, and then subsequently jumping in them. This year, the girls got a couple chances to jump in the leaves. Our maple tree is quite a bit bigger this year than years past - DUH! - and we had more leaves than ever. This small pile doesn't even represent half of what we had. Emily made this pile all by herself after school one day last week, and she decided that it was big enough and she couldn't wait one more second...she had to jump.

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Pure Autumn Joy.
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i LOVE this picture. Lovelovelovelovelove......
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This is from the next day. Storms were rolling in, and I thought we had better get outside soon before the leaves became a soggy mess. Today's theme was leaf rain. Our next door neighbor joined us for the fun. And about five minutes after I took this picture it poured. Water this time, not leaves....
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