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.