Our Thanksgiving 2023!

 We had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend, spending time with each other and family and appreciating our blessings!

Our annual Thanksgiving hats that the girls make each year!

Oliver loved to tell us what turkeys say!

Wednesday was pie and roll making day! 

It was also a crazy day because it ended up being moving day for Melissa! She came out with her kids in October, all of us thinking she'd be with us for about a week. It took a lot longer than planned for her apartment to be ready and they were with us for 33 days. We were all excited when her apartment was ready and are so glad they are still only five minutes away!

We spent the morning relaxing. I turned on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for a bit in the morning and when the kids got bored, we watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

Our Thanksgiving dinner spread (after everyone had been dishing up)! 

I took this video for our friend in Norway.

We had a lot of different kinds of pie! 

We had pumpkin, coconut cream, banana cream, chocolate cream, key lime, apple, pecan, and pumpkin squares. 

I had to sample a lot of the pie! 

Oliver ate most of it for me, but I did get to taste each one and they were yummy!

When everyone left, we finished off the evening by watching Miracle on 34th Street.

My book for Thanksgiving weekend :) 

The next day, we had pie for breakfast and then went over to Holly Days! 

Ben stayed with Oliver while he took a nap, and I took the girls and their cousins uptown.

Vernal does a big event the day after Thanksgiving each year, with a ton of events. This year, the wind was absolutely freezing, but we still managed to have fun.

We started off in line for a bungee jump thing they had, but the line moved very slowly because it was only a single person thing. Because the younger kids didn't want to do it and it was so cold, we ended up leaving the line. Parker was trying to keep her face out of the wind and tripped, falling on her nose. It was not the greatest start to the day, but we got in line for the wings and the kids had fun on them.

We started walking toward the hot chocolate when we saw the gingerbread house contest was in the museum this year. Since it was inside (meaning, warm), we were all for it. The kids loved seeing the different houses and some of them were really elaborate! After we all voted, we braced ourselves and went back outside.

We also stopped for a carriage ride on the way to hot chocolate. Last year, the kids and I went to get snacks first and ended up missing the carriage ride, so we got in line while we could. It was fun to ride in the carriage. Parker was having a hard because she was cold, but she ended up having fun and laughing a lot on the ride.

We walked over and got kettle corn, hot chocolate, and cotton candy and warmed up temporarily by their fires. But we were all pretty cold still, so we decided to give up on outside activities and went back to the car. Ashtyn and Parker were hoping to do the bungee jump on the way back, but they had stopped doing it. It was really disappointing to Ashtyn.

We decided to drive over to the middle school to Satna's Workshop, a craft fair that runs each year during Holly Days. Melissa had a booth there, so we stopped to say hi.

Before we made it in to Melissa, the kids found Santa and all stopped to say hi (except for Thomas, who was more interested in buying a Pokémon toy one of the booths had for sale).

After the craft fair, we went over to Trees for Charity. It was a long line, so we played some games to pass the time and then got to see the trees. Ben's brother and sister-in-law do a tree each year in honor of her father (who passed away when she was a girl) and the kids were all excited to vote for it. The kids all loved hearing who each tree was helping and I loved sharing that with them. One of the trees was for a girl we know named Nelee, who got a rare bone cancer this year. Parker ended up using her ticket to vote for that tree, but the rest of the kids voted for Donovan and Jessica's. 

It was such a sweet experience, I am going to take my kids each year from now on.

And finally, this month, we filled up our gratitude tree. We had Melissa and her kids to help us and we love it! We truly have so much to be grateful for. 

Family Memories in October!

 October was such a blessing-packed month and we had such a blast spending time with family, celebrating Ashtyn's birthday, and doing Halloween/fall activities. 

Halloween shopping! 

We didn't buy the masks, but the kids loved looking at all the Halloween stuff.

Our Halloween decorations after cleaning off the porch.

Growing up, I remember putting up Halloween decorations on our stairs and now my own kids love doing the same. As we do Halloween activities or crafts throughout the month, we can add them to the wall.

😂😂

Oliver is the cutest.

When Oliver struggles with sleep and needs Mom snuggles, I just try to soak in these moments before he grows out of them.

Watching Scooby Doo with her Scooby Doo.

Playing Pickleball! 

Ben and I loved taking the kids over to the park with pickleball courts, especially with the beautiful weather we had at the beginning of October.

Ashtyn's 12 days of Ashtyn leading up to her birthday, where we give her a little gift each day leading up to her birthday for 12 days. All the kids love the new tradition.

Ashtyn made a cute little countdown chain to her birthday.

Pumpkin pancakes for Halloween time!

Halloween is getting old enough to get excited for holidays and it's really fun!

Ashtyn loves finding and taking pictures of praying mantises.

Rylee drew the alphabet like the one on the wall and then hung it up 💗

Parker was drawing her emotions.

Ashtyn has decided she wants to learn cursive, so she has been having Ben and I show her how to write each letter and then practicing on her own.

I was helping the kids make skeletons out of Q-tips and thought I could draw a skeleton for Oliver on the paper. This was the face he made 😂 I ended up making him a skeleton out of Q-tips too. 

The skeletons turned out really cute! We did a mini skeleton unit study and this was part of it.

The kids had a lot of fun with our unit study and I actually learned a lot too.

Our sweet neighbors brought a haunted house kit for the girls to put together.

We also took advantage of the warm weather to paint outside.

 The girls each got a wooden box for their 12 days and we finally painted them all.

A fun fall activity we did was trace leaves onto coffee filters. Then we colored them with washable markers and sprayed them with water to blur the colors together. They turned out really cute!

Another fun thing in October is that we got a new couch! 

It was long overdue.

It was quite the project putting it together.

 It was a bit of a splurge to buy a new couch and we don't like it as much as we were hoping we would, but we like it way more than our old ones.

Oliver playing in the box!

I was trying to get him on camera from what he was doing earlier (he was saying "beep beep vroom vroom" and pretending he was in a car) but this was cute too.

Our couch!

Right after getting our couch, I got pretty sick with a cold. I ended up missing my cousin's wedding because of it. When I started feeling just a little better, I made an apple pie and it was delicious!

Our movie night in because Mom and Dad were feeling sick. 

We watched The Ghost and Mr. Chicken and had ice cream and pie for dessert.

About a week later, when my mom was visiting, Oliver got sick. 

It wasn't a terrible one, but he had a little fever for a couple days and had a cough.

Then Rylee got it and it hit her hard. She got an ear infection, had a low-grade fever for a few days, and had a cough. 

Then she got well enough for Halloween activities and that must have wiped her out, because she got worse again for a couple days before getting over it. 

This year, the bugs have been crazy.

 Ben found this fly in our garage, we've never seen a fly this big.

The last secret project! 

It's bitter sweet.

One week when we got home from church, we found this snake in our driveway. 

We chased it into the weeds in our backyard to try to keep it from getting run over. 

Parker made these pumpkin cookies all by herself and loved it! 

They turned out really yummy.

We also got to go on a hike with Chris and Ashley.

We also found a longer one we can try another time!

Oliver loved the sand!

Laughing at tractor videos on YouTube with Grandpa 💗

We started watching Scooby Doo at Halloween time and now it's Oliver's favorite show. 

It's cute how much he loves it.

Playing Dad's guitar 💗

Parker dressed herself up and wanted a picture.

Our dryer started giving us issues, so Ben and his Dad found this stuck up inside it.

Fixed our dryer!

Ben sold some of his other Pokemon cards to buy this Charzard card that he wanted.

Oliver wants to work like Dad!

Rylee 💗

Ben has been playing a lot of Pickleball and has gotten a few minor injuries from it.

This was his worst one, right on his knuckle.

We loved having cousins with us for the end of October!

Ben and I went out on a little B Fruity date during Oliver's nap while Melissa was home with the kids. 
I got to try their pumpkin crepe and it was yummy!

Oliver discovered the "car" at the park and he loved it! 

He spent so much time on it.

Chilling at the park while we played pickleball!

The boys were dragging the big water bottles around and it was cute!

Oliver loves pickleball!

The park!

Morning snuggles with cousins!

Thomas loves playing piano!

Ashtyn and Lizzy looking up cheer moves to practice.

Jonathan is learning to like me even when his mom isn't around 😂

Leaf time!

Jonathan was so excited about the leaves.

What's in the leaf pile?

Park days when the weather was still warm!

One of my kids' favorite Halloween activities is to make "witch's potions" with baking soda and vinegar and it was extra fun with cousins.

Carving pumpkins! 

It was extra crazy and extra fun with eight kids this year.

All the kids except the toddlers drew their own designs and I love them. 

The older kids also carved their own.

One of our favorite traditions is getting a picture of each child with their pumpkin, making the same face as their pumpkin.

And sugar cookies! 

We were wanting to make them anyway, so we decided to make them for our ward trunk or treat.

We also had a bunch of yummy, tart apples, so I made a couple of apple pies for the trunk or treat as well (I made one to take and one for us to eat at home). Rylee was sick the morning of the trunk or treat, but we managed to get her there to do it. She was so excited for it, I couldn't bring myself to keep her home. Ben stayed with her in the car during the dinner and then she was able to go trunk to trunk and was super happy about it. 

Giant balloons from trunk or treating!

And painting pumpkins! Rylee was feeling pretty sick this day as well.

She painted her pumpkin and then lay down and slept the rest of the day while Melissa took the other kids to the Mayor's Walk (a trick or treating our city does with the shops on Main Street).

Our porch was full of pumpkins this year!

I loved seeing the kids draw themselves in their costumes!

We ended up getting matching dresses for all the cousins from Costco and they are super cute!

Playing gymnastics class with their dolls 💗

This was our Bingo for Halloween/fall and it was fun to do so many fun activities, especially since we got to do a lot of them with cousins! We finished off the month with Halloween fun, which has enough pictures to warrant its own blog post. It was a great month!