Thanksgiving 2010

Thanksgiving is still one of my favorite holidays. This year we were sad not to be able to go to Utah for the Hartley family festivities. Hopefully in the future we can get together and bring home the trophy. From the family reports however, the Richard Hartley family did their part to represent by bringing home the goods for the year.

In Elk Grove, we didn't have a trophy, but we did get some good bowling time in. This year we invited the Spjut family to our house for the big day. They have 3 kids that match up in age with our kids (and they like to go bowling). It took some calling around to find a bowling alley open on the holiday, but we finally found an old place and hauled the families up to Carmichael to let them loose with the bowling balls while the turkey cooked. The kids almost made it through a whole game and the adults didn't exactly post record breaking numbers. We did have a great time and came home plenty hungry.
In the afternoon we had our big meal. The kids ate in 10 minutes flat, then they were off to play games and run around the house. We tried to enjoy our meal but we laughed at how interrupted and frantic the meal really was. It's fun to have young kids. They are just very demanding. To end the meal on a high note, Katie Spjut brought out 3 desserts to help us all really indulge. Pie, cake and pudding filled all the extra cracks we may have had left. We chatted and played with the kids for the rest of the evening and had a fantastic day.

Black friday was crazy for us this year. Darryl went to Toys R Us when they opened up at 10 pm on Thanksgiving night. He waited outside the store in line for an hour and a half then finally got in and waited another hour to buy the items he picked out. Unfortunately the weather turned cold on Thanksgiving day. The temperature was about 20 degrees that night. I went to Kohls in the morning around 7 :30. I shopped for an hour then waited an hour and a half to buy my items. We were both exhausted by noon on Saturday. We found our second wind in the evening when we decided to paint the living room before getting a Christmas tree. It only took 3 hours and we got through 3 big walls. We went to bed very satisfied.

After the shopping spree for Christmas stuff, we decided that we should get in the Christmas mood and decorate for Christmas. We went on Saturday to pick out a tree then brought out our meager decorations. We realized that most of our Christmas stuff is from decorating the condo in Fremont. Once we got everything out and hung, we started to notice how bare our home looked. We added to our Christmas supply by making some window decorations with the boys and neighbor kids. We also picked out some new non-shatter ornaments and garlands. The boys were great helpers putting ornaments on the tree and reading Christmas stories. We caught the Christmas mood really quickly.