Happy Thanksgiving!!!

The kids had the week off from school for Thanksgiving, which meant Monica and the kids had all kinds of time for fun!  But as Thursday approached, it also meant there was a lot of cleaning to do to be ready for people coming over.  The kids were pretty good helpers with cleaning everything up, and so they got rewarded with a movie.  And what do you do when 3 kids want 3 different movies? Pull out more screens.  I helped Grayson get the Mario movie up and running on my old phone, and he watched it cuddled up with stuffies in bed. 

In terms of cooking, Thanksgiving was slower than usual for us this year as our guests really filled out the sign up sheet.  We had a little over 20 people at our house for Thanksgiving, and I'll admit that once everyone was here, the house was much less full than I expected.  Here we all are enjoying Thanksgiving dinner together.

In celebration of our 15 pounds of sweet potatoes we harvested from the garden, Monica was crowned Sweet Queen, and we got couples shirts.

On Friday afternoon we drove down to San Antonio to go to the temple.  Monica went in the early afternoon while I checked into the hotel with the kids.  We went back to pick her up, and then ended up at Kneaders for dinner.  Bedtime was interesting... but we eventually got through.  Monica read the kids some of the pages of Grayson's dinosaur book, and her little word swaps were just TOO funny.

I find that when we get to hotels now a days, the kids have trouble falling asleep in the same room.  I think there are a few factors here. One big one being that when we put Grayson to bed, he actually stays up in his room for a while doing who knows what, and so when we do normal bedtime at a hotel he's just not ready to sleep.  So he and Winry were having all kinds of issues, and Brooke was off with Monica just not even trying to sleep.  Anyway, I think the new hotel plan needs to just be keeping everyone up later, and then doing bedtime.  This problem doesn't usually exist on vacations, the main time we stay at hotels, because the activity all day long usually tires the kids out.

Saturday morning I got up and went to temple, and when I got back, we packed up and headed for the zoo!  It's been a while since we've been, seeing as our memberships expired in February, but it was fun to be back.  The gibbons were being all kinds of silly and entertaining like last time, and the fishing cat was just sitting on a platform right in front of the window.  I decided to have pictures more focused on the kids than animals though, so here they are at the hippos.

This was the first time we didn't bring a stroller to the zoo.  All the kids did fine walking around on their own, and to be honest, I think if we DID bring a stroller, we definitely would have had to push kids around.  So it's probably good to just not have the option going forward.  That said, I instead had a backpack full of water bottles, and I felt much more tired than usual by the end of the day.  Maybe it was related.  Since we didn't have a stroller, we took the secret path, that contains stairs, to the exit at the end of the day, and who should we find, but the capybara!  That was a very pleasant surprise, and the kids were so excited!

Saturday night when we got home, we went to get a Christmas tree, and we really only had time to get it home and in a stand.  So Sunday morning we started decorating.  We went with a 10' tree this year, which meant even I needed a ladder to do the lights and star on the top!  I didn't take a picture of it fully decorated, so I'll have to leave you on a cliff hanger and post one next week!

And those are the highlights from this week.  Merry Christmas!