Thanksgiving Weekend

My little sister Rachael and her family were all able to come and see us for Thanksgiving, so that made me happy!  And of course, we had Tom and Donna here, too!

I LOVE eating Parkerhouse rolls, but they are a big fat pain to make.  So it was nice having Colton AND Rachael helping me out the entire time!

Hanging out with baby Clayton!

I get all excited when I can make my hair be curly for a couple hours!  (I think it weirds Craig out, though!)

We all fit!  (Barely!)

All the food turned out really good this year.  I feel like it's not uncommon to have one thing not really work (last year it was my mashed potatoes, I don't know why, and I frequently manage to screw up those rolls), so it was kind of exciting to have EVERYTHING be amazing!

After dinner the kids got their homemade ornaments from Grandpa!

It was so nice to just relax on Friday and NOT cook!  I did roll out of bed kind of early to exercise (but it was at 7am instead of 5:30am, so even that felt like a break!  Although it was weird actually seeing all these people in broad daylight!), but then I ate myself silly all day.  Better than eating like a crazy person and NOT exercising, right???

Clayton is at that really fun stage where he rolls everywhere in slow motion.  It cracked me up, because he barely ever seemed to move and then-- suddenly-- he'd be in a totally different place!

Playing Uno with Nolan

Staring at our phones like the truly anti-social people we are...  

And then Saturday was Ryder's birthday!!!  He is 10 years old now!!!  We gave him our gift right away and he was delighted with it:

Craig was also hard at work getting the tree up and the house all decorated.  I appreciated Harrison laying down to just enjoy the tree for a bit!

I was showing our bed to Ian and Craig decided it looked suspicious enough that he'd better document it...

Bentley likes to take dorky selfies on my phone.  I appreciate how Kendra always just goes along with whatever weird face he's pulling.  She'd probably be good at improv...

And then that night Tom and Donna got us Five Guys (as per Ryder's request) and Ryder got to open their presents for him!

He might have been a little excited when he opened up his iPad...!

Rather than a cake, Ryder wanted root beer floats, which everyone enjoyed.  But it was a little tricky putting candles in them!

And then Sunday we had church AND it was the Primary Program!  Craig had been hard at work editing all the footage together and trying to make everyone sing in the same key (not possible) so it was fun to finally see the finished product!  And then we got to hold Clayton some more during Zoom Sunday School while Rachael got her family all packed up and ready to leave...

Just snacking on a reindeer while waving around a fairy wand!

He kept trying to roll off everyone's lap-- such a funny baby!

It was such a lovely weekend!  Yay for Thanksgiving!  Thanks, Rachael & Ian for coming all this way to see us!!!