Thanksgiving in Utah

This year we were able to spend Thanksgiving in Utah again. It is awesome because all of John's siblings get together and my sister Meghan and her family still live there. John had to work a couple days while we were there so that gave me good chance to head down to Provo and get together with my friend Ashley and my sister. Ashley and her family just moved to Provo from Round Rock for grad school. It was so awesome to see Ashley and to see Netta and her son Ethan running around holding hands the whole time. It was so cute and I could kick myself for not getting a picture. After visiting Ashley we met up with Meghan and her kids at BYU. I loved BYU and I love going back to visit. My kids were so excited to go to Utah for the snow and of course it snowed a ton before we got there, but not once while we were there. Luckily BYU still had some piles of snow leftover.

King is in this super stubborn phase right now and insists on wearing the same pair of sandals every day. Well it was cold so I tried to make him wear sneakers, but since he can take them off I can't really make him do anything and so he spent most of the day walking around in his socks. Of course that was not very conducive to climbing a snow pile.

One of the highlights of getting together with Meghan was that Conrad and Timmy finally got to meet. Timmy is 2 1/2 months older than Conrad and about twice his size!

As always my kids had a blast playing with their cousins. 

I love this picture of Conrad and Timmy. Best buds holding hands already. 

On Thanksgiving all of John's family got together at the church so we could all fit and right before the meal we did Conrad's baby blessing. It was great to get to have so much of John's family there. We now have officially split the baby blessings equally between the two families. EZ and Netta were with my family and King and Conrad with John's. (Not sure why he loves to make that fish lips face so much).

Thanksgiving dinner is always followed by tons of games. King really liked this huge ball. If you look closely he is actually wearing his sandals with socks. Since he kept taking his sneakers off we finally caved and let him wear the sandals, but of course with socks since it is cold. You will also notice that he is in ball jammies. He became obsessed with these as well and insisted on wearing them all the time. If you took them away he would just yell "My balls. My balls. Where are my balls?" This whole clothing battle is one that I just don't care enough to fight.

Frisbee dodgeball is always a must. Netta basically spent the whole time running up and down the line collecting frisbees and then passing them out to people. 

EZ took things a little more seriously and I was able to get this cool action shot. 

We stayed with John's brother Jeremy in their new house and it was perfect. Not only did they have 2 rooms for us to stay in, but they have 4 girls and one is EZ's age, one is Netta's and one is King's. My kids were so happy and so occupied that it was amazing! Sadly though I only have 2 pictures of the kids together. I really messed that up. Here is Netta with Cassidy, who is EZ's age. I really need a picture of Cassidy and EZ together because they were joined at the hip the whole time at the house. 

With all these kids we had to find ways to keep everyone amused and so we hit up this place called Jungle Jim's that has a bunch of carnival rides inside. It was so awesome and I am really bummed we don't have one by us. 

Netta liked the rides, but of course also really liked the candy. Her collage-aged cousin Harry was so impressed that Netta remembered his name that he gave her a dollar and of course that went to good use and got this lollipop.

Here is EZ enjoying a ride with Jeremy's oldest daughter Alissa.

Thanks to having all these people around, germs spread like crazy and a serious stomach bug hit each and every family and either left you throwing up, having diarrhea or both. The disease struck EZ, John and King, but not Netta or me, which is amazing since I always get what the kids get. Sadly, that meant different families were quarantined at different times and we didn't get to see everyone as much as we would have liked. EZ was especially bummed that we didn't get to spend as much time with Misha's daughter Arden.

We love going to the Aquarium in Sandy and as luck would have it our last day there the Aquarium was actually free, so of course we had to go. John's sister Buffy was able to join us along with her kids Cinco and Libby. Cinco was so sweet to Netta and was holding her hand as they walked around. All this cousins holding hands and playing almost had me in tears. 

Buffy won over our kids by letting EZ and Netta spend the night with some of the other cousins and then her and her husband Stewart drove everyone home in their motorhome. My kids were at first really confused as to what a motorhome is. Netta followed Buffy into their mud room and said "Are we in the motorhome yet?" But once they figured it out they were in love and now they say we have to get one. They also started telling everyone that we are moving to Utah in 2 years. I have talked about moving out of our house in 2 years, just into a better house, but apparently that won't be good enough for them. I just can't compete with the fun of being around so much family!