Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season is always so wonderful.  We love the time to get together with family and to simply enjoy each others company.  With these holidays being focused on gratitude and the birth of the Savior, it seems to go hand-in-hand with spending quality time with our families.  What a blessing!

With that said, we had originally planned on staying home for Thanksgiving.  Sad huh?  We had thought since we are traveling to Idaho for Christmas we wouldn't travel for Thanksgiving, but we changed our minds; too lonely.  We are so glad we did!  In our minds, we will never regret taking the extra time and money to spend time with family.  Only the opposite of that will bring regrets.  No one else was able to travel home, so it was just us with 3 of Tasha's younger siblings and parents.  We had such a great time.  The kids always LOVE going to Grandma and Grandpa's house, and they always love having us visit.  Leading up to the trip McKay would list out the days until we left by saying, "Tomorrow is church day, then 'have-a-home evening' (FHE), and then Grandma and Grandpa's house!"  At the G and G part he would get high pitched and squeaky and SO excited. 

Lele was pretty excited to be sitting by the big kids in the back instead of riding solo in a middle chair.

Can we just say that it is so nice being able to travel to Idaho in a minivan?  Minivans may not be 'cool' but boy are they kid friendly!  It is SO nice having sliding doors on both sides.  And by taking out one of the middle captains chairs there is plenty of space for stuff or changing diapers or so many other things.  Neither of us grew up thinking to ourselves, "I can't wait for the day when I have a family and can drive a minivan!"  But they sure are practical when it comes to the day-to-day life of kids and family.

McKay LOVES going out and working with Grandpa Pearce.  He went out with him 4 of the 6 days we were there, and these are not quick trips.  When Dad Pearce goes out to work and feed he is gone for 3+ hours easily.  All McKay needs are his cowboy clothes, some food, and a listening ear for all his questions.  Grandpa laughingly commented, "His questions are sure never ending!"

 Since Quinn has the option to work from home when needed, we were able to make the trip into a longer one than we would usually get.  We were gone for 6 days, and those extra days make so much difference.  We didn't feel rushed and felt like we could completely relax.  Which is what a trip/vacation should really be about, right?  Tasha was even able to complete ALL of her Christmas sewing with her Mom's tutoring, which is more than we expected.

Helping prep Thanksgiving dinner by licking the whipped cream off the spoon.  Who said dessert has be be AFTER dinner?

Patiently waiting for her Thanksgiving dinner

Gensie insisted on sitting by Grandpa

The top two are Washington-grown blackberry pie.  SO good!

This Thanksgiving our homemade pies were a a little bit of an experiment.  Any of you who have had Tasha's pies before know that she makes WONDERFUL pies (husband brag).  Well we decided to really put that to the test since we used whole wheat flour instead of white,  coconut oil instead of shortening, and Sucanat (a more healthy/less processed sugar) instead of white sugar.  Not that I doubted at all, but Tasha did a marvelous job and the pies were great.  She did say (and I quote), "Man, you think pie crust is hard to work with?  Try making whole wheat pie crust!"

The kids with Aunt Nani and a little kitten.  That kitten was a huge hit!  We actually had to make rules about the kitten being off-limits at times because it had been held SO much.  Seriously, there were times we had to make the kids leave it alone so it could use the litter box in peace.

 

Snuggled together for a movie

As we have said before: Gensie loves her Grandpa.  She had been put in bed already but came down and went straight to Grandpa because she knew Mom or Dad would take her right back to bed.  :)

The only downside to our trip was that Avonlea managed to burn her hand on the fireplace.  It is a free-standing unit and since we knew kids would be running around we had a fence around it.  Well, Lele found her way past it and very innocently touched the stove.  It broke our hearts to have that happen.  Especially when she would just shake and stomp because you can just see her trying to say, "It hurts and I don't know how to get away from it!"  We were able to get her to sleep a little over 2 hours after it happened and she slept for about 2 hours.  She was much more manageable after that, but those two hours were rough.   Our always happy and friendly baby was not a happy sister.  To add to this, the stress of this brought on a pretty hot fever that held on for 2 days.  She was up all night Sunday night where I was rocking her downstairs because she only wanted her Daddy.  If anyone else wanted to take her she would just call/cry for me.  Her fever broke Monday so she was pretty good for the car ride home.  And if that wasn't enough, a day or two after we got home we find that Lele had Roseola as well!  She had all the signs: fever, body rash, decrease in appetite, runny nose, loose bowels, irritable, etc.  But she has kicked it all and is back to her happy self.  :)

2 days after the initial burn

 Rather than end on a sad note from such a happy trip, we thought you would enjoy this video of Lele playing with the kitten.  She was thoroughly intrigued by the kitten, but it made her nervous.  She would go right up to it, but would hesitate to interact too much.  Well, one night when Tasha was working on some Christmas sewing projects Lele decided she needed the measuring tape as a necklace, just like Mom.  Little did she know that a moving 'string' is truly the cats meow!  We had a great laugh.