Happy Thanksgiving!!!

We were able to have our driveway/garage etc. sealed on Monday before the snow rolled in! We new this was something we needed to mark off our check list before the holidays took over and the bad weather came! Next, my family arrived Wednesday morning!!! Chris and I have been looking forward to this arrival for the last month and we were finally together again! I have not spent Thanksgiving with my side of the family for 6 years so this was a real treat and than to have them come to our house was even better!!! I got to have the pleasure of having my mom at my side in the kitchen helping me with my first Thanksgiving dinner! Boy did I learn a lot and I could not have done it without her! It made the experience so FUN!!! Everything turned out fabulous and the family had a great time playing games and eating snacks while they waited for the big feast! Chris was in charge of the potatoes and cutting the meat! I really love that Chris is SO supportive and wants to be apart of everything I do! He did an AMAZING job on the potatoes! I will have to make sure he keeps this job for the years to come ;) We all played, ate and took naps while others continued playing board games lol before more family came over! Chris' cousins and family stopped bye throughout the day to see my family and/or our new home which meant a lot! Chris and I feel so blessed to have two wonderful and I mean wonderful families!!! To have our families be so supportive of each other has really made life a better place~

Thanksgiving day was just the beginning because the following day we all went up to see Ty, Jessi and their kiddos! I was so excited to see little Harli :) We ate leftover thanksgiving food for lunch and hung out with the little ones before everyone other than Jessi and Harli went to the barn to do some horse and/or pony riding!!! This I have to say was a MAJOR highlight!!! After it started to get dark and we put the horses away, we kept the pony that Hallie flew off of when he got startled which I still feel bad about :/ Non the less Hallie recovered enough to get back on for a little bit just in time for us to come up with a brilliant idea! Yes it was a Wester idea so it was something that we should not have been doing but we made our own little Wester Rodeo with the Shetland pony!!! It started with John getting bucked off when rying to ride it bareback and than we had to have him do it again for the rest of the family to see! It was so funny that of course the other boys just had to see if they could do it and who could stay on the longest before getting bucked off riding bare back! Of course we all pulled out our video cameras so we have some amazing footage if anyone wants to witness our eventful evening! Following the Wester Rodeo, we kidnapped Tyrel and stopped at Temple Square for the Christmas lights!!! This was the first for half of my family! It was very cold but so worth the memories spent with my family and again Chris was so so supportive to have 12 people now staying the night at our house! He was so cute and thoughtful, the night before my family arrived Wed. Chris stopped at Best Buy for a couple more t.v.'s to have in the other bedrooms so that the family could all have their entertainment throughout the week they were at our house :) He is so wonderful and sweet! I could not have been blessed with a better husband!

So that night we had the pleasure of having Tyrel with us so that he could be down here to take us all to the BYU vs Utah football game! He was so kind to let Fran and James join us and if that was not sweet enough, Tyrel hooked us all up with the Blazers vs Jazz basketball game after the football game which included all 12 of us plus all of Chris' family!!! We were all burned out with the four day weekend that we just spent Sunday sleeping in and me doing haircuts before my family decided to go up to grandpas before heading back to Oregon :( This gets harder and harder for me each time a sibling that visits or the whole family visits that I am a total sob fest for a week before I can begin to keep it together. As much as I love my family, I do not ever want to see them leave. I can't wait till the day they really do get to move to Utah! I think that is also why its hard...knowing that none of them want to go back :( Until next time, I love you all and I could not have asked for a better Thanksgiving break!!!