Very Belated Thanksgiving Week Post

This year Andrew's pre-thanksgiving APS conference was in Salt Lake, so he decided the whole family should go and we would stay and spend Thanksgiving with his family. We drove up on Saturday (in our nice new wonderful van, that did make the trip much more pleasant than normal.), dropped Andrew off at his hotel in SLC, then the kids and I went on to his parents in Bountiful. I spent the night with them, went to Church on Sunday, then left all the kids and met Andrew back in SLC to spend a couple of quiet days with him and no kids.

Sunday night his conference was having this really cool demonstration of a fire tornado. I unfortunately forgot my camera at the hotel, and was worried if I went back I would miss the show. You can look here http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/bm04/burns/ to see some pictures from the guy who did it. It was totally cool, and I was wishing I had taken the kids to see it.

Monday I had some blissful alone time, before meeting Andrew to take a friend of his to Temple Square. That evening we blew off all the people that had invited us to dinner and went for a walk around SLC and dinner by ourselves.

Tuesday, I snuck into the conference to watch Andrew give his presentation, then left and went to the Temple. They were putting up the Christmas decorations at Temple Square while we were there. These are some pics of all the nativity scenes that were already done.

After his conference ended Tuesday afternoon, we went on a few tours around Salt Lake. We went up the Church Office Building to look out over the city.

That night we went out to one of our top 3 most expensive dinners. I did embarrass Andrew when I asked for an empty take out bag.

Wednesday was back to reality, meeting up with the kids, and spending the next few days with Andrew's family. His whole family was in town for the holiday, it is the first time in several years that all 39 people have been together. Early Thanksgiving morning we all met for a family photo. I didn't manage to get one of the whole group, but here are all the grandkids and our little family group. After dinner, we found out that the picture will soon be outdated, as Nate and Monica are expecting their first child next summer. Congratulations guys.

On Friday, Juli blessed her new baby Chase, with the whole family there. After the blessing we drove to Andrew's brother's house, and Sandy promptly got sick, and spent the rest of the night doing battle with her stomach. Andrew and Krystal went to see Enchanted and said it was a really good movie. (this is a lot coming form Andrew, who tends to hate Disney movies).

Saturday was craft day at the Cook's. This is a tradition that we did not know about, as we have never been to the Cook's for Thanksgiving before.

The kids all had a great time without mom and dad for a few days. Travis went to one cousin's house without any of his siblings, and apparently spent most if his time playing pool, video games, and watching movies. Diane said she hardly saw him at all. He thought it was great. Mindy and Sandra went together and had lots of fun playing with cousins they hardly ever see. Kyle and Cammie stayed at grandpa and grandma's to be with cousins their age. Grandpa took them out to the horse pasture and Cammie fell in love with riding horses.

On the way home, we ran into the Homec family at McDonalds in Winnemucca, NV. That was a fun surprise, esp. for Sandra who had fun playing with Madisen.

Julie has more pictures of the week on her blog. http://www.richandjulifam.blogspot.com/

For those who keep track, (RICH) , Kyle did not get sick once on the whole trip. As we were getting ready to do our "Let us get there safely" prayer, he asked that we add in a plea for him to not get sick. It worked.