Thanksgiving

The week of Thanksgiving was a great week for us mostly because Jarl was home Wednesday through Sunday. Hooray. It was wonderful to have him home, celebrate the holiday, spend lots of money, see family, and be home.

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving my mom, Liz, and I took the kids to get their picture taken all together in their cute Christmas clothes my mom bought for them. They all looked darling. I love getting the kids’ pictures taken as evidenced by how much money I’ve spent on pictures this year. I have so many pictures of them, I don’t have places to hang them all.

Wednesday was pie night at my Uncle Brian and Aunt Stacey’s. It was fun to see the extended family and catch up on what they’re doing. I got to hear about my cousin Anne’s exploits in Taiwan, my cousins John’s job and his search for another one, jokes from my Uncle David, and more. It was a great surprise to my Uncle Rod and Aunt Sharon from Arizona because we didn’t know they were coming up. This meant we got to meet Julian and Marya—the kids they’re adopting. John just finished working on Disney’s newest movie, The Princess and the Frog. We’re looking forward to seeing it.

Thursday morning we enjoyed looking at the millions of ads and then going down to Mona and Camille and Nick’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. We took stuff for the kids to make turkeys using apples, toothpicks, fruit loops, gum drops, and marshmallows. After our yummy dinner we went to my parents and enjoyed seeing them and Sharon and Rod again. It was a fun day.

Friday we did more than our share of spending to make Black Friday successful in America. We finally bought a new kitchen table. We’ve had our eye on one for the last two years. This year we got enough money put away to purchase it and then waited for Black Friday since that would be the best sale. Jarl went early and was extremely disappointed to be told that they discontinued the table we wanted in July. Ack. We waited too long. He came home and we started looking on the Internet to see if anyone still had one in stock. We did find one for a few hundred dollars more. Then Jarl was inspired to call the store again and give them the model number. A lady looked it up and said they had one in the warehouse. We got the kids in the car and hurried back to the store and bought our table. We were really blessed to be able to buy the very last one and to get 22% off. The Lord was really watching out for us. Our new table will be here Wednesday.

Friday evening we made some ornaments out of fun foam for our tree. Our dogs Molly and Penny destroyed so many of our ornaments last year that we thought we’d make some replacements. The kids had fun but the glitter glue ended up everywhere. Jarl and I are thinking we might try it again in a few years when the kids are older or just use the sticker fun foam rather than glitter glue and stuff that had to be glued on. We had fun and will now have a few more ornaments for the tree.

Saturday we stayed home since Jacob hadn’t been feeling well since Thursday and had thrown up Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. Jarl was amazing and got all the laundry done. We fed the missionaries dinner. Jacob talked nonstop and told them that when he gets big he wants to go on a mission to Mexico like his Uncky Mikey. We also enjoyed watching BYU beat the U in overtime. Thank goodness for DVR so we could pause the game half way through to feed the elders.