Ahhh, Thanksgiving!!

I love Thanksgiving! The family festivities commenced once again in Blackfoot, ID and were replete with the usual Thanksgiving activities: turkey, homemade chocolates and candies, eating until your stuffed, napping, the annual bowling tournament, fireworks, a turkey pinata. . .you know, all of the usual stuff. (Next year we are considering adding a turkey egg hunt done in costume, and a cotton candy machine.) The weather was wonderfully mild this year which made the fireworks all the more festive.

Here is the spread before we dug in (minus a few salads that were placed on the table after I snapped the photo). Every year it is pretty much the same and every year it is AWESOME!! Seriously we look forward to the food frenzy all year long.

This year we had my parents, my Aunt Kathy and Uncle Brent, my 2 cousins Dustin and Jake and their families, my sister Heather and her family and our family. Here is a quick picture of the kids before the start of the annual bowling tournament:

We always go bowling on Thanksgiving night and the competition was fierce this year! Adam won the men's side with a whopping 162. I am always super happy if I can break 100 (it has only happened a few times over my long and distinguished Thanksgiving bowling career). Libbie called in her score from Vermont earlier in the day--121. Ouch, the bar was set high. Well, the results are in! My Mom ended with a 117, Marci L. had 124 and I managed to do the impossible, I got a . . . drum roll please. . .

I had to have evidence to support such a sensational claim. I bowled a 135!! That's me "HC" and that, my friends, is MY score! (I have plenty of eye witnesses) After 20 plus years of bowling defeat I have claimed the title of all titles--The winner of the women's DI trophy for the year 2008. And it would be all mine. . .if we could just find it, that is. (We are pretty sure it was lost in 2005 or 2006.) Anyway, I am determined to live it up because I know it will never happen again!

Now, moving on to the Settlers Tournament. We played 4 games in all with the quote of the night being, "We are not here to make friends." It was intense.

Hilary won 2 games,

Adam won 1 game

Dustin won 1 game

Jake, Marci, Larah, won 0 games.

None of us made any friends, but we all had a lot of fun.

That leads us to the fireworks portion of the evening (I'm just moving with the natural progression of things here). We didn't have any cops show up this year, that is always a good sign. (I'm kidding, of course. . .well, kind of. .)

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the Turkey Pinata (that was smack dab in the middle of my official Thanksgiving nap, sorry), but the kids had a lot of fun.

The boys playing wii.

We had a great time and missed everyone who lives too far away to attend. Hopefully we'll see you back one of these years. Until next time. . .

Happy Birthday Korinne!

My baby isn't a baby anymore. Korinne turned 3 years old yesterday. She would only smile really big when I wasn't trying to get her to pose for the camera.

Aunt Kim made her an awesome cake. My sister Tiffany and her daughter Abigail and my parents were passing through town and came to Korinne's big party. Kim (Korinne's BFF) came for the whole birthday weekend.

In this video Korinne makes it very clear how she feels about our singing:

I didn't think we were that bad.

We were excited because the Utes won the big BYU/Utah football game and are off to a BCS bowl. This was the ice cream we had for the party:

Korinne is excited to be 3 but still tells people that she is 6. She was with me at the store when I bought her #3 candle and she said, "Mom, not three, six!" I explained to her that she was only turning 3 so we were getting a #3 candle. She was a little miffed, but accepted her defeat. Jenna is turning 6 soon and Korinne wants to be just like her sister. They love to wear twinner outfits whenever they can:

We love our girls!

The Alliance

We picked the kids up from school yesterday afternoon and headed to SLC. My parents had 2 extra tickets to the Jazz vs. Suns basketball game and invited us to go with them. Adam's sister watched the kids and we had a great time at the game. Our original plan was to leave at 7:00 a.m. this morning which would give us plenty of time to get Britton to school on time. After talking to my Mom and realizing she had quite a bit of office work she could use my help on we came up with an alternative plan--Adam would take the kids back to school and I would stay and get my Mom caught up in the office and then I would catch a shuttle back to CV from the airport. My parents were picking up my sister, Tiffany, from the airport at 1:30 p.m. anyway so dropping me off to catch a 2:15 p.m. shuttle wouldn't be a problem. What a great plan, right? I arrived in plenty of time to catch my shuttle but 2:15 p.m. came and went and the shuttle never arrived. After checking to make sure I was at the right location (which I was) and talking to a USU student from Hong Kong who was also waiting for the shuttle, we saw the shuttle coming but he never pulled over or even slowed down, he just kept right on going in the next lane over. I thought surely he would circle back around because there were obviously 2 people waiting, but he never did. When we called the shuttle company and they basically said, "Sorry, he must have forgotten you, we will be happy to put you on the 8:15 p.m. shuttle" WHAT !?! That's 5 hours from now! Kelly from Hong Kong had to be to work at 4:30 p.m. and was already using words like, "ridiculous", "not acceptable" and "can I speak to your manager?" They put her on hold and never got back to her. When I finally got through on my phone I spoke to a girl who sounded about 16 years old and was so scared I was going to rip her head off her voice was actually shaking. I was quite calm under the circumstances (I was really mad at this point) and said in my best no-nonsense voice, "Ok, this is what we are going to do, you are going to refund my money right now (we paid for the shuttle when we booked it online). She replied with, "Ummm, I don't think I can do that." "Yes, you can and you will. Get me someone who will authorize this for me right now." (How did I do? Are you shaking in your boots? It is hard work being pushy, I wonder how people are able to do it on a daily basis) By this time Kelly and I had formed an alliance and were already on our way to the rental cars. We got our money from the shuttle back and got the cheapest car we could get and were off. It actually ended up saving us about $5.00 a piece, which is a good thing because we were not happy campers and over an hour off schedule.

With our crisis averted my new friend Kelly and I talked all the way to Logan with the exception of a few moments when I took a call from Adam that went something like this, "Umm, yeah, your daughter got in a little bit of trouble." Knowing Korinne (and I knew immediately he was referring to Korinne and not Jenna), "little" was really code for "BIG." "Well, she found your make-up bag" ( I don't even need to describe the kind of destruction she can do with my make-up bag), then he said, "it gets worse. . .do you remember what you keep in your make-up bag?" I immediately thought of the hair cutting scissors I have hidden in my make-up bag so that we don't have any Jenna self-hair cutting moments and gasp, No! She didn't! (dramatic pause) Yup, she did. He continued, "It was really quiet so I went to see what she was up to and that is when I found the hair."

Finding a chunk of hair like this is NEVER a good sign. He assured me it wasn't as bad as the great haircutting disaster of 2005, but it was definitely noticeable. We just barely had Korinne's hair cut into a cute bob and it was all one length. Now it looks like this:

It's not too bad, it just looks like we are growing out her bangs. . .again. (We just finished growing them out and it was finally all one length). Oh, and to top it off she colored on the wall in Adam's office, just for good measure. And just like Jenna in 2005, she was pretty proud of her new haircut.

Ok, I just noticed that I use way too many parenthesis and quotation marks when I tell stories.

Question. Which bear is best?

Weekend Update

I kept waiting for something blog worthy to happen this week, but each day came and went and I never did get inspired. Now it is Saturday and it has been almost a week since my last post. Since this doubles as our family journal I've decided to record all of the small stuff. Here it goes:

1- Britton has started Jr. Mustangs Basketball. His team name is the Wizards and he loves playing. . .almost as much as Jenna doesn't love having to sit through his games. They won their game this morning and Britton scored a few times so he was pretty happy.

2- Korinne decided one morning this week that she wanted to wear real underwear. Ok, I thought, if she is that excited let's go ahead and just get this potty training thing over with. 4 days later we tallied the score and found she had about 20 accidents and 0 successes-- I'm thinking we'll wait a little longer before we make another go of it. I'm all about waiting until they are 100% ready (this is code for if they can't get it in 2 days or less, I'll just wait). Potty training is NOT my thing.

3- Adam and I were called to be on the activities committee in our ward a few weeks ago (that would be the party planning committee for all of those "Office" fans out there). This week the committee head put us in charge of the food for the ward Christmas party on Dec. 6th with a hefty budget of $250.00 to feed about 300 people. Yes, we believe in miracles.

4- My kids accidentally discovered "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" on TV this week. It is an animated series based on Star Wars. They loved it from the start. When I tried to tell them that it was based on a series of movies made with real people they thought that was too weird and didn't want to watch any of the real movies. Go figure. I didn't mean to have my kids not know anything at all about Star Wars, it just kind of happened that way.

5- I filled up the car with gas today for $1.98/ gallon. It was awesome.

If you just read this whole post, you are a true friend. Until next time. . .

"Fetch" and other random events

Here are some random happenings from this week:

1) A considerable amount of time was spent playing "fetch" with my girls. I'll explain but first let me give you a little bit of background--Korinne likes to pretend she is a kitty. . .a lot. She can be seen crawling around on hands and knees and saying, "meow" more than I would like to admit. She's just a few weeks shy of her 3rd birthday so there are definitely worse things she could be doing than pretending she is a kitty. We have embraced her feline aspirations and actually encourage her if it means she will be more cooperative during the day. I was helping Jenna with her school work one day early in the week and Korinne kept bringing me a plastic CD holder that was disc shaped and easy to "fetch." She would bring it to me in her mouth so I would throw it away from the desk and she would crawl over to it, meow a few times, pick it up with her mouth and bring it back to me. We repeated this process about 100 times. I didn't have the heart to tell her that kitty cats don't play fetch, only dogs. The following night she and Jenna played fetch with each other for the better part of an hour. Who needs pets when they have kids??



2) What is the world's largest dolphin?? The killer whale, of course. Every 5 minutes or so Britton will be more than happy to share such important facts with you. (This is the fact he came in with as I started this post.) Britton can often be found reading books about animals and science and trust me when I say he doesn't believe in keeping all of this knowledge to himself! We all benefit from his studies.

3) Jenna has added cooking to her repertoire. Here she is making her first batch of macaroni and cheese.

She has a real interest in cooking, just not eating. If she could live off of applesauce, macaroni and cheese, and oatmeal she would do it. Getting her to eat anything else or to try something new is like trying to get a normal person to eat crickets. It just isn't going to happen. I keep waiting for this 3 year food battle to end. (Believe me when I say she has gone to bed many a night hungry!) On a positive note she is getting pretty good at making what she will eat all by herself. Hot chocolate? check. Oatmeal? Easy peasy. And now she can make herself Macaroni and Cheese. Not bad for a 5 year old. (No calls to DFS, please. She is properly supervised at all times.)

On a whim we took the kids to see HSM3 last night. It was fun and we enjoyed it, but I was a little disappointed with the wardrobe, or the lack thereof in this case. It made me remember what Britton said while watching HSM2 last year. "Umm, where the rest of her dress??" My thoughts exactly!

Snow Canyon & The "Lava Walk"

The weather was so nice on Saturday we headed to Snow Canyon with Adam's parents and the kids' cousin Kaly for a picnic lunch and some hiking.

Britton had his "animal explorer" hat and walking stick and was spouting off animal facts while studying every rodent hole and sign of animal life. Jenna wore the "cutest hiking outfit ever!" and told everyone how cute THEIR outfits were. She enjoyed writing her name in the sand with sticks and talking to everyone on the trail.

Korinne continues to walk to the beat of her own drummer.

Basically it's like this with Korinne. If you ask her to turn one way, she will immediately turn the opposite direction and then give you a smile like the one in this picture.

Here she is hiking with Gramma.

Here is Britton being a true "animal explorer."

After leaving Snow Canyon we drove a few miles to see an extinct volcano. Britton read a book last week about Volcanoes and Earthquakes and he LOVED being able to see the volcano and lava rock.

He got a small lava rock to take home as a memento. He was so excited and said, "Mom, I have a GREAT idea for the blog. You could take a picture of my lava rock and the title of the post could be 'Lava Walk' instead of lava rock and you could write about walking by a volcano" Very clever. You can see how times are changing when my kids are thinking of headlines to record their daily lives in the form of blog posts.

Quote of the day:

Me, "Jenna get your seat belt on, we are going to go and see a Volcano!"

Jenna, "Is it going to interrupt?"

I laughed on the inside. Erupt, interrupt--very similar. No, I don't think the volcano will be interrupting today. :-)

Happy Halloween

The kids had Thursday and Friday off from school this year so we headed down south to visit Adam's parents and spend Halloween at their house. It was unique in that we didn't have any school Halloween activities so last night was their one and only shot to get dressed in their costumes. We woke up yesterday morning to orange pumpkin shaped pancakes made to look like jack-o-lanterns with chocolate chips.

Now before you go starting thinking I'm all cool and stuff (because I know you were) I must confess that it was all Gramma. Unfortunately I'm as "holiday challenged" as ever as it would never have crossed my mind to be so festive with breakfast on Halloween. The kids loved it because not only were the pancakes like pumpkins but Gramma had the plates on black cat place mats. Fun stuff.

Britton decided to be an Animal Explorer for Halloween. Jenna was Cinderella (again) and Korinne was also a Princess. We were very happy that she was content to be a "generic" princess using one of our normal dress ups from home as her costume. Here they are with their cousins Ashlan, Kaly and Aidan ready to go trick-or-treating.

The weather rocked! Adam and I walked around with the kids in short sleeved shirts. I don't remember the last time that happened! After trick-or-treating we took the kids to visit Grammie in the hospital. She had surgery earlier that day.

She was in good spirits and enjoyed seeing the kids in their costumes.

The best part of Halloween. . .sorting the loot!