Thanksgiving 2010

This year was a fantastic Thanksgiving year! I LOVE Thanksgiving! It has always been one of my favorite holidays and this year did not disappoint me. All the men in Dan's family went Elk hunting over Thanksgiving day so we had to have our big dinner the Saturday before (which was great because then I got to have another Thanksgiving with my family on Thursday) and we celebrated over at Adam and Aubrey's. I made the turkey this year and it was AWESOME! If I don't say so myself. 

I was really good at taking a bunch of pictures with Dan's family but I totally forgot to take them at my family's party. It was equally fun and delicious though and can I just say - I LOVED that I didn't have to worry about rushing to someone else's Thanksgiving. I was able to Eat, Sleep and be Merry on both days!

So here are some pictures from the first Thanksgiving:

Gramma Kaye: Our family matriarch.

She loves her children and grandchildren so much and we can all feel her love and compassion for us. I am thankful for her.

I am also thankful for Thanksgiving football games in the backyard. I am grateful that the grown-ups come out to play with the kids - what great examples they are. 

 Dan has 3 sisters but only 2 of them live here in Arizona and sadly we don't get to see them as often as we should, they are phenomenal ladies though, and my kids really love both of their aunties. Nicole (left) is Dan's oldest sister and the kids all call her Coco - Olivia LOVES her! She is the best at spoiling and loving unconditionally. Kaela (middle) is a great aunt too. We see her even less than Nicole, mainly because she lives more than a 2 minute drive from us and she works a funky schedule, but that doesn't stop her from being amazing to the kids too and they know that she is awesome.

Ashley

Miss Olivia

Ryleigh (with her Chocolate Silk Pie)

Daniella

Jayda

 I have some pretty fantastic nieces too. I get the privilege of knowing Ashley and Jayda on a different level since we are neighbors. Thankfully, Daniella (who is painfully shy) actually came up to me and gave me a hug on Thanksgiving - and she looked me in the face! yeah!!!  

We tried our best to stack the kids up and get a fun picture but it was just not happening. Someone might have gotten a better picture than this, but this was the best one off my camera. We are missing Maddox and Kingsley (Cory & Hayley's boys) because they live out of town but I did hear they are coming for a visit soon, so we will have to recreate this then!

My nephews are pretty great too! They are all the same age practically so they can play with each other FOREVER! Sometimes they do argue a little about the activity they are going to do (usually because Spencer always wants to have his way... or no way)

This was the clearest picture I had of Joel - he is a wild child!

Ethan

Spencer

Garrett

And of course Dan has a little brother that is a year older than Ryleigh, so even though he is technically their uncle we always group him together with the nieces and nephews. He doesn't seem to mind - yet.

Ammon

Funny thing: I let Ammon take my camera around a take some picture with it (I think he is really into photography) and when I uploaded my pictures I had about 20 shots of Ironman on the trampoline in different positions - so I decided to post a few...

Update!

Ryleigh had softball tryouts this week and she found out today that she

MADE THE TEAM!!!

We couldn't be more proud right now.  We are so excited for her and can't wait to watch some competitive softball!

YEAH RYLEIGH!

Halloween - oops!

I can't believe that I have not posted Halloween. It seems like I can go for months struggling to come up with stuff to post to this blog and then all of the sudden I have 20 things that I need to post all at the same time! But I like everything to have their own days - so I try to space out the posts.

Anyways, so here is Halloween Finally.

 Spencer went as Harry Potter. He is really into Harry Potter right now, I think it is because he is finally at an age where he can read the books and really understand what is actually happening in the story and it is really a fascinating story - if you have not read the books then do it! The movies do it no justice - if you think they are good, then you are in for a real treat.

 Ryleigh was a Salsa Dancer. cha cha cha. A friend of mine makes herself a costume every year from scratch and then lets Ryleigh and my other nieces go through her box of old costumes each year. I am grateful for that because I don't know what is going on with costumes for older girls but they are horrible! They are so trashy.

 Olivia was Pebbles Flintstone. I actually made this costume myself. Thankfully it was pretty basic, thanks to prehistoric designs. I thought she looked great and she loved it. Olivia was very unsure about Halloween this year before Halloween, she did not like the scary stuff at all.... but then she learned the magic words "trick or treat" and you get candy and now she is all over it! She asks me if we can go trick or treating at least every other day.

 Ethan was a dementor from Harry Potter. He pretty much just likes to be the nemesis of whatever Spencer is going to be. As long as it is scary. Ethan likes creepy gross things and Spencer wants to be the happy fun things so it works out pretty well for them. The only bummer was everywhere we went he couldn't wear his mask - rrg. So he just looked like a weird-o in a black dress.

Since Halloween was on a Sunday this year it kinda messed with things a little. Thankfully our ward puts together a pretty fun Halloween party that we went to the week before Halloween and then on the Saturday before Halloween we went over to my grandparents house for a little Halloween party that they put on for the kids and then we went over to their stake trunk or treat, which turned out to be a blast.

Yellowjackets

Ryleigh is playing softball this season. It has been a tough season for their little team. The fall season is always a little tough for regular players because club teams are allowed to come in an play as a team and coaches that recruit teams before the season can then sign up as a team. Since we were not a part of either Ryleigh just got assigned to a team of girls. The girls on the team are great but they have never worked as a team together and it shows. Unfortunately they have lost every game so far (and Thursday is the last game) but it seems that they are all still having fun playing.

 This season Ryleigh has taken to catching. She says that she loves it, and that makes me happy. Originally their team had a girl that wanted to be the catcher, and she was excellent at it, but after they lost their first game she quit the team. So Ryleigh stepped up to the plate (literally) and has stepped in to be the catcher, and she does a great job. I am proud of her.

 But... I think her love is first base. She is great at first base and this season it has been a real workout because most of the throws that come her way are not a straight shot to her, and she is having to run, jump and dive for it.

 She is a great hitter! She loves to bat and she is pretty aggressive at it. In fact at her last game she hit a GRAND SLAM! yep! That's right. The bases were loaded and she smacked that ball all the way to the fence! I was a proud mama!

 The fun part of this season is that Ashley & Jayda (cousins) are playing too! We are 1/3 of the team! haha! The girls are so cute to watch play together.  This is their first year playing and both of them have really made such huge improvements. Jayda has actually started pitching and she is good! She is probably the best pitcher on our team. She really loves softball, I think, and will probably go on to play in the spring. Ashley is so fun to watch. She runs like Bambi (in fact that is our little nickname for her) and she is ALWAYS smiling. She is so cute. Ashley's first love is cheer leading, and it shows. I don't think she will be able to continue with softball because it will conflict with cheer, but it has been fun to watch her anyways.

Since Ashley has this amazing gift of height (she might be taller than me - if not , she is as tall as me) and so she can almost ALWAYS draw a walk. We can always count on her to be the base runner we need.

 At our last game Jayda was pitching and she got smacked in the face with the ball - and lets just say it was a bloody mess. She very calmly covered her face and walked off the field and her dad and the coach got her some ice and stopped the bleeding. We had to stop the game for about 5 minutes to help her out but since our team is missing a player we couldn't continue without her. So as soon as she stopped bleeding....

 She walked back out there and pitched the rest of the inning, and she did an amazing job! I think she struck the rest of the batters out!

So Ryleigh is going to try out for her Junior High Softball team next week, and I will keep you posted on how that goes.

A little sneak peek!

We had my amazing cousin Nikki take our family pictures again, and once again they turned out amazing... the only trouble is figuring out which ones to frame...or at least put in the big frame. Here is just a little sampling of them.

A New Blog

I am being ambitious! I am starting a new blog devoted to food! I really like to cook, and I am pretty good at following a recipe so I thought I would start posting recipes that my family loves. The goal of this new blog is to get a new dinner recipe posted everyday for one full year! I don't know if I can do it - but I am going to try my very best. I am hoping to find some variety in my dinner routine - I feel like we are eating the same things over and over again! So - follow if you like.


http://365recipes.blogspot.com/