Thanksgiving Part IV - Snowy Mountain

It's a tradition in Brian's family to go up into the mountains the day after Thanksgiving and cut down Christmas trees. While we weren't getting a tree for ourselves, we went along for the fun and especially the snow! Since there was no snow yet down at Grandma's house, the kids were so excited to see some. There wasn't even a lot of snow up in the mountains yet this year, but enough to have a little fun in! (And thankfully, Grandma has a big bag of different sizes of boots, etc. to borrow!)

There were several snowballs thrown and the kids tried to build snow "stuff," but there just wasn't quite enough snow for too much building this year.

We built a big bonfire and roasted hot dogs for lunch.

There was one small sled there, and the kids had a grand time taking turns sliding down a small hill. (And I had a very hard time getting them to keep their gloves on!)

And you'll never know how much effort it took to pull the kids away from their fun long enough to snap a family picture...

Thanksgiving Part III - The Wheat

One of the things we were excited about for our trip to Wyoming was bringing home a load of wheat. Brian's parents grew a crop of white wheat this year and wanted to give some to all of their kids. This was the main reason we drove our truck.

The wheat was stored in a silo, so the first job was to get some bagged up. They loaded it into Grandpa's truck to start with.

They weighed one bag and it was about 150 lbs!

McKay helped scoop the wheat up into the bags.

You can see that the wheat hadn't been "cleaned" yet (I think it's also called "fanning" where they use some type of fan to blow out all the extra chaff and other unwanted things, like grasshoppers and such).

Brian and his dad decided to try using the conbine to somehow clean the wheat. They had to build a special chute (I think?)...

...but alas, that didn't seem to work very well.

We decided that there wasn't time to try to get it cleaned somewhere else (probably down in Utah) before we left for home. So we took our chances on bringing the "raw" wheat home and finding a place in this area to have it cleaned (plus we need to locate a bunch of storage buckets).

The next step ewas to transfer the wheat into our truck. We were also bringing home a bunch of wheat for Brian's sister who lives in Texas. They moved all the bags over and estimated it was about 3,000 lbs! You'll notice that our truck tailgate (on the right) is quite a bit lower than the other truck. When we started it was higher.

In the end, Brian took about 4 bags off our load so there would be some room for our luggage! He did a great job packing it all up tight.

We were a little worried about how the truck would handle that heavy load driving all the way home, but it did great!

We did use our wheat the other day to make some bread (cleaning a little bit out by hand). Hopefully soon we'll have some buckets and a place to get it cleaned and stored. And then the most important part -- actually using it!

Thanksgiving Part II - The Farm

The kids love going to Grandma and Grandpa's house in Wyoming because there are always lots of fun animals to see. Plus the kids usually get to help feed them or take care of them in some way, which they love to do! (If only they were so enthusiastic about doing chores at home...) You'll notice from my pictures, that one kid in particular was especially fond of the animals.

There are pigs...


and horses (new this year!)...



and especially, chickens...


Brian's sister and her husband (who live next door) have a chicken coop and collect the eggs to sell at a local market. While all the kids were excited to see the chickens, Courtney was the one who BEGGED every day to go out and collect the eggs.


Courtney absolutely loved this job and was not afraid of the chickens at all!


I thought they were a little annoying, because every time you walked into the coop they would all swarm over to you and peck at your shoelaces the entire time.


Courtney loved collecting a bucketful of eggs -- she'd reach right in underneath the chickens if she had too.

And then she'd want me to boil one for her so she could eat it!


We love the farm!


P.S. Brian's sister and her husband also started out raising 4 turkeys this year that were to be for our Thanksgiving dinner. Sadly, however, none of the turkeys lasted long enough. I think a couple got sick and died and the last two were killed by some other animal just a couple of weeks earlier.

Thanksgiving Trek - Part I

Wow, I'm really getting behind in the blogging lately. I didn't have access to our Thanksgiving pictures right away and then with recovering from the trip and getting into December and Christmas decorations and other projects... Excuses, excuses. So here we go!

We decided to make the trek to Star Valley this year for Thanksgiving. Most of Brian's family was going to be there and it had been a while since we visited. We also decided to take our truck so we could bring back some wheat Brian's parents harvested this year. (More on the wheat later.) We knew we were in for a long drive with everybody squished in the truck, so even though we live 10 hours closer than we used to, we thought it better to break up the trip.

Fortunately, my sister Amy lives almost exactly halfway between here and Star Valley (in the Denver area). So we invaded her home for a night (thanks, Amy & Greg!) and the kids had fun sleeping in the family room.

We also loved seeing cousin Emma and how cute and big she is getting!

We arrived in Star Valley on Sunday evening (we pulled the kids out of school for a couple of days). The mountains there are always so breathtaking!

The kids were disappointed there wasn't any snow at Grandma's house this year. But it was still plenty cold!

However, the cold didn't deter the kids from doing things like jumping on the trampoline.

Or swinging on the backyard rope swing.

We spent the week just relaxing and visiting with the family. Brian helped with the wheat and worked on a couple of other projects. A lot of the family went to see the movie "Twilight" one evening (I volunteered to be the babysitter since I hadn't read the book yet and didn't want to see the movie first.) Brian's sisters (who are great quilters and are working on converting me) brought an easy quilt project to work on. I needed a lot of hand-holding, but I got mine finished!

McKay liked helping split a bit pile of wood for the stove.

And of course he took any chance he could to hop on the 4-wheeler.

Thanksgiving dinner brought over 30 people!

Lots of good food and visiting.

We're thankful that Brian's parents are always such gracious hosts. I know it can't be easy to have that many people in your house for several days and all those kids running around playing hide-and-seek, but they are great about it.

We took two days to drive home as well, this time staying at a hotel in Denver (as my sister was out of town by then). The last day or our drive, we hit some pretty slick roads in the Denver area, but we finally made our way out of the stormy weather back home!

More Thanksgiving pictures coming soon...

Cute. Sleepy. Ballerina.

Just have to share a few pictures of our cute little Hayley-bug recently.

Hayley hasn't napped regularly for quite a while now, but she does get to bed later than I'd like (sharing a bedroom makes bedtime more challenging) and occasionally she falls asleep in the later afternoon (usually while watching TV). Recently, I've found her asleep in some very interesting positions!

Seriously, how could you sleep like this? Poor girl must be pretty tired!

And she finished up the semester of her dance class a couple of weeks ago. I went on her last day and took a few more pictures.

She was having some issues with her shoes staying on that day!

She's had a great time! I'm still debating whether to sign her up for the spring semester or not. The class itself isn't that expensive, but I found out they have a spring recital and you have to buy the costume, which is probably about twice the cost of the class itself. Crazy. Decisions, decisions...

Christmas in the Air

We have yet to dig out all the boxes of Christmas decorations or put up our tree (and exactly where the tree is going to go is another question...), so we're a little behind the times. But, when I went looking for the box with the advent calendar in it the other day (December 1st snuck up on me a little too quickly this year), McKay was with me and spied a box of lights so he grabbed it for himself.

McKay seems to take after me when it comes to Christmas lights. I love Christmas lights. (And as a little side-note, despite my love for Christmas lights, I'm probably not going to make Brian put lights up on the house this year. He is so busy right now between work and trenches and conduits that I don't want to add anything else to his plate. Plus, there's the fact that this is our first Christmas in this house and so there most likely aren't any hooks already on the roof, and our ladder isn't around, and nobody ever drives by our house anyway since we're way out yonder... Maybe next year.)

Back to McKay. He has always been fascinated with Christmas lights and wants to string them up all over the house, across doorways, etc. (and then change them around every-other-day). So I've just given in and let him put up lights in his room. He got right to work with the box he discovered. (I did have to set some guidelines including no thumbtacks or nails in the wall every few feet.)

Pardon the mess. :-) And you can only see half the room here.

The kids are definitely getting into the Christmas spirit, despite the lack of a tree for the time being. Today the girls were playing before dinner and when I went to check on them, they were "flying" this through the house:

I don't know how well you can see it, but they've got four of their Webkinz dogs hooked together two-by-two with yarn. The dogs are then hooked to a reindeer Webkinz. At first I thought they were playing Santa's sleigh, but they explained it was a dog sled team pulling a poor reindeer who had a broken hoof (they also told me the dog team could fly, however, just like reindeer).

It's a fun time of year, and I'm trying to keeping things simple and lessen the stress and increase tne enjoyment. Not always an easy thing to do, but worth the effort.

I have lots of pictures to share from our Thanksgiving trip to Wyoming, I'm just waiting for them to be transferred over from the laptop - hopefully soon!