Thanksgiving Festivities

We had such a relaxing Thanksgiving Break. We have never had Thanksgiving with just our little family before and decided it was about time. Each of the kids decided on one thing that they wanted to be in charge of to help. My load was lightened due to all their great help. On Wednesday the kid's didn't have any school so we started preparing some of the food. Camille made 4 pies with practically no help at all. What a wonderful help she is in the kitchen! She made 3 pumpkin pies and 1 chocolate pudding pie. Thursday morning each kid started their tasks and didn't even complain :)
Tanner was our potato peeler and a great one at that! He was so quick and peeled around 15 potatoes.

Carter was able to put the cheese on the celery with Camille's help. They looked so yummy and tasted great!

Bradley acting cute and trying to find something to keep himself busy. He was getting into one thing after another making our morning pretty exciting! Bradley has such a fun personality and constantly is doing something to make us all laugh.

Parker and I made rolls. Parker did such a great job at helping me put the ingredients into the bowl and then forming them into balls. Johnathan was so excited to be doing the candy cups. He took great care to make sure each cup had the exact amount of candy. He also created as a surprise a special card for everyone telling something that he loved about each of us. These special cards included a colored picture for each of us. He was up at the crack of dawn making them - he is such a thoughtful kid!

Byron did awesome at carving the turkey and was such a great help in the kitchen! I definitely couldn't have done it without his wonderful help. He even spent the afternoon taking all the turkey off the bone - my least favorite job:).

Camille has a knack for decorating and did an awesome job at getting the table just perfect! She was pretty excited about her masterpiece:).

This is taken after we all sat down to eat. The food was delicious and we enjoyed talking with each other. We created a "thankful tree" that we added leaves indicating things we are all thankful for throughout the week and read through them together as we were eating. After eating our meal we needed to all take a break from the kitchen and headed down to watch the Macy's parade that we had recorded (thank goodness for DVR:) We fast forwarded to each performance. We especially loved watching David Archuleta. We all love his music and have played his new CD non-stop.

The kitchen clean up was the next fun part of our day. Luckily 8 hands make light work!

Parker & Carter as Pilgrims and Indians. Notice my little BYU fan decorating his vest with "Y"s all over it.

We headed up to Grandpa & Grandma Beck's house in the evening to enjoy time with family. The kids were so excited to spend the night there since we rarely do this. We enjoyed visiting with family and the kid's loved spending time with their cousins.

Friday morning Byron headed out at 3:45 a.m. to find the great deals with his mom and siblings. I am so glad he enjoys and looks forward to going out since we are able to get some great deals for Christmas. Byron won't go to K-Mart since it is always a mess and usually doesn't have the sale items. I found some things that I wanted from their so I decided to get up at 6:30 and head to K-Mart. I was able to find most everything I went for. The sale items were not marked which made it very chaotic and hard to find the item I was looking for. Byron reminds me that we go for the sport and if we end up with anything it is a bonus. He has seen so many people go crazy in the lines and not act in the Christmas Spirit that he has to think this way. I hope to do most of the remainder of our shopping online to avoid the fun lines and rush.

Thursday night upon seeing family we noticed that Bradley was really scared of his Uncle Eric - this was such a strange behavior since he LOVES seeing all of his aunts and uncles. Every time Bradley would have to even go in the same room which Eric was in he would start crying and run to Byron or I. We soon found out from Eric that when we were up a few days previously Eric was downstairs taking a nap since he wasn't feeling good. Bradley didn't realize that he was on the couch while he was downstairs. Bradley started to get into some things that he shouldn't have - just as he was reaching his hand into somethings Eric said, "Hey." Bradley was so scared that he ran upstairs and wouldn't go back down. We all got a good laugh since we didn't even know that his had happened a few days previous. Luckily he warmed right up to him again after being there for about one hour. Silly boy!

We had such a great weekend and are now looking forward to this wonderful Christmas season!