Thanksgiving 2009

We went to my parents' house for Thanksgiving this year and had such a great time! All of my siblings and their families were together. It was awesome.

The nut cups



Some of the cooks and the carvers



The feast (minus Brooke's pies)



The family





The grandma's boy. Tyler only wanted my mom to hold him. He would hang on her legs as she tried to work in the kitchen until she would pick him up. If she tried to pass him off to one of us he would cry and throw a fit until we put him down, and then he'd hurry back to Grandma. (I think they had a secret pact to get my mom out of cooking. Hee! Hee!)



One night we went out to eat at the local bowling alley. Surprisingly the food was super yummy there.

Here we are waiting for our food.





Having a blast bowling.




Black Friday

My parents live in a small town "out in the middle of nowhere," which means that to get to a town with lots of good Black Friday deals, you have to travel 2-3 hours. So, after making our Black Friday lists (and checking them a bazillion times), we left at 12:50 a.m. (yes, that's in the middle of the night) and drove 3 hours to our Black Friday "pick city." We arrived at the mall at 3:40 a.m. and were some of the first in line to get in on the 4:00 a.m. good deals. We then headed to Shopko and waited in line for the store to open up at 5:00 a.m. (One bonus here is that Shopko handed out tiny maple bars and printed instructions on where to find the deals and how to check out.) We then headed to WalMart, Target and KMart before stopping to eat breakfast at Mc Donalds. We ended our shopping frenzy where we began--at the mall, where the rest of the stores had FINALLY opened up. We made it back to my parents house around 1;00 p.m. with a van full of good deals. It was such a fun day!

I don't have a picture to go with this year's Black Friday experience, but I'll include the one from 2 years ago. That year Brooke, Kimberly, Darrell and I headed out at 3:00 a.m. (sheesh, we got to sleep in that year) to make it to the 5:00 a.m. deals in a town 2 hours away. We had a great time and got lots of things that filled up Brooke's van. Brooke decided to get some toilet paper at Costco, among other things, as we headed out of town. She secured the t.p. on top of the van with bungee cords (there literally was not room in the van) and off we went. Imagine our surprise as we were heading down the freeway to find rolls of toilet paper bouncing off the van and on to the freeway. Kimberly, Brooke, and Darrell tried to salvage what they could (I was pregnant and stayed in the van), but alas, we never could find all of the rolls. Anyway, we had such a good laugh out of it and a great memory to talk about at subsequent Black Friday ventures, that I had to post about it here.

Here we are with some of our recovered t.p. Brooke has a prized one--it was very rare to find a roll with the wrapper still on.