Thanksgiving

Well, we've all had the sniffles this week, so I'm late with our posting. All of us except Kevin of course. He NEVER gets sick! It's been a bit of a rough week or two with some sleepless nights, but I think we're all doing quite a bit better now. Anyway!

We had a lovely Thanksgiving with Kevin's family. It was quite a BIG Thanksgiving, with both hosting people and packing up and going somewhere combined! We got to see lots of family and the girls loved playing with cousins, it all turned out well.

Tuesday I helped out at Cora's preschool Thanksgiving feast. So cute! They had a little lunch and did some crafts.

Making turkeys out of gumdrops, toothpicks, and caramel apples.

Kevin and Violet picked Grandma Anderson up from the airport. We loved having her with us, it's so nice to spend one and one time with grandparents-- we heard lots of great stories about Grandma growing up and her family memories. The girls especially loved reading books with her.

Wednesday we met up with the rest of the family from Oregon and the little girls and Kristen and I went to the zoo. It was a free entry day, with not many crowds and sunny (but cold) weather... it was great!

We spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at the place Kevin's parents rented--- it was large and hosted our big group so well! There ended up being 12 of us staying there and 20 people for Thanksgiving dinner. Much bigger than the Thanksgivings I'm used to, but it was a lot of fun. Our days were filled with eating yummy food, football (yeah for a great BYU game!), card games, and catching up. I got to meet Aunt Julie, Uncle Gary, and cousin Sarah from Texas for the first time (It was actually Kevin's first time meeting Sarah too-- and she's 11!). The girls had a special outing with Grandma and Grandpa to the dinosaur museum and had a great time. We also went to Temple Square to see the lights turn on for the first time this season. It was a really nice weekend! Thanks Brad and Dawn!

Violet didn't play with the bigger girls very much, but these 5 had such a fun time on Thanksgiving Day!

We packed up Sunday and made it back to our house to get settled in time for church. Kristen, Sorayah, and Kylee stayed with us until Tuesday morning, when they flew out to Mexico to meet up with Byron for the winter soccer season. All four girls were pretty spent by those last few days, but I think they still had fun playing together, even if a little more refereeing was involved :). That's a lot of days of fun when you are 1, 3, and 5!

Monday night we went to the Riverton city lights celebration. They had cookie decorating, crafts, hay rides, and Santa. There were some long lines and a lot of people out, but it was a fun evening to get us out of the house.

Isn't this look on Sorayah's face priceless??? She loved talking to Santa! I think she could have stayed there all night!

What a great way to celebrate Thanksgiving! And a nice start to our Christmas holiday with seeing the lights on Temple Square and going to the community Christmas party. It's been so much fun already to have the girls so excited about Christmas, and for Cora to understand so much more about Christmas, I've got lots of Christmas plans up my sleeve!