Saturday afternoon didn’t end the greatest with BYU’s loss to Utah, but it was fun to watch the game with family anyway. Luke Ashworth grew up in our ward, and his dad talked about him in church today. He mentioned several of Luke’s recent injuries, including torn shoulder ligaments during yesterday’s game. It was a crazy game!

I hope your Thanksgiving holiday was wonderful!

Our Joy School had an extra party with my friends’ preschool group where they listened to a story and then ate a lunch together wearing pilgrim and Indian headbands.

I had the creativity itch one night and wanted to make my own Mayflower (since the Pottery Barn models are not only extremely expensive, but sold out). I was so excited to come up with my own! I didn’t have all the supplies I wanted, but made do with what I had on hand. Last night, I picked up some sturdier materials for a bigger model... for next year maybe.

I used a Family Fun idea for napkin rings, which turned out to be such a hoot! Our family and Rosalie represented the pilgrims while Andrew’s family and Tessy were Indians. They were fun enough to make and look at, that it was okay that we didn’t end up using them due to our meal arrangements.

We tried something we’ve never done... go out to eat for Thanksgiving dinner! We had already eaten a Thanksgiving meal with Jon’s parents the Sunday before, and going out turned out to be much more cost-effective, not to mention saving us loads of time in meal preparation and clean-up. We showed up to the Cracker Barrel, shopped for a few minutes, enjoyed a huge meal with all the trimmings, topped it off with pumpkin pie, and walked away from the messy table and dishes. It was really nice!

Tyler had a sippy cup full of rootbeer, and downed 3 pieces of pie (along with other food). He definitely loved it there!

I also felt satisfied with food-making by baking “turkey feet” rolls that week, and adding a fruit turkey gobbler to our evening meal.

We returned to a clean house and had a lot of time to play together. Andrew’s family stayed over Wednesday - Saturday, so we had non-stop fun together! Thanksgiving evening was filled with Indian leg wrestling, disco dancing in the basement (bunny hop, chicken dance, limbo, you name it; Rosie led us in some sweet Samba action, too!), movie-watching and game playing.

Friday night, I went to the Carl Bloch exhibit with Courtenay, Barney, Mary & Millie, and the Crandalls (Jon’s relatives). Talk about amazing! I’ll be going again with Jon (and taking the iPad tour) in two weeks.

We all enjoyed dinner together at our house followed by racing RC cars. Jon and Andrew cleared the room and made a race track, which was a blast for the whole group. Susan was the funniest, and I enjoyed watching Jeff crack up at her antics.

Jon has quite the story to tell about that huge Christmas tree in the corner that he and Andrew got for free! It was the type of adventure that only he can do justice to, so I hope he’ll blog about it.

Saturday, Jon and Andrew took the kids to BYU for more car racing (in the empty ballroom and Cougareat Terrace). We returned later with the whole family and pizza for more racing fun.

On Friday, we took our families for our first and last time roller skating. Cruel as that may sound, it was fun, but we considered it more of a learning experience than a repeatable excursion. It sounded like a great idea, but we had eight kids flailing all over the place, falling down and getting hurt, tears flowing, and backs aching from trying to hold up the struggling kids. We swapped their roller skates for scooters, but the younger kids enjoyed pretending to play the video games more than skating in the rink. Add to that the expense, and we’ll just check it off our list of activities we have done as a family! Man, that sounds worse than it was, but you get the idea anyway.

In other news...

Jon, Gary and Andrew poured our front yard sidewalks a week and a half ago. The kids are already in love, and I am so grateful to have a solid surface to walk on for the winter!

We had another successful “Theory Thursday” with all 3 kids, which was awesome. We did miss the Thanksgiving Thursday, though.

Natalie composed her own song last week called “Sunset.” I think it’s really cute. I’ll have to record her playing it.