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 After dinner, we found out that the picture will soon be outdated, as Nate and Monica are expecting their first child next summer.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.

Update on my conflict

Well, we decided that with a couple of trips planned in the next 5 months, we really do need something reliable so we are dumping the old van. I am not really sad at all about this, it is old and yucky. The real hard part is the fact that we have had it paid for for many years, and now with our new purchase we will be burdened with debt. I guess I really was just sentimental about having some cash flow.

What to get was a very hard decision. It is not fun to be spending a lot of money with any uncertainty if this is actually the very best of your choices to meet your needs. One of our concerns is that we do go on long trips with all the kids. We need to be able to fit 8 people in the van. Ideally it would have enough room so that all the kids can have space to themselves to help alleviate some of the inevitable fighting that always occurs.

We thought something like this might be nice:

There are enough seats they can all have their own. The drivers are separated from the passengers, and if the kids behavior gets bad enough we can always threaten them with riding on the top.

But alas, these are a little hard to come by in Brentwood.

So I thought about this:

Just think what great shape I would be in after carting kids around town. And if they were being bad, I could make them peddle. It even has a luggage rack on top. But unfortunately, I don't think I would ever be in good enough shape to make it to Utah or Washington with less than a year driving time. (Work and school frown on taking that long for vacation)

Another option was:

There are enough seats. There is room to move around while driving. It comes with a stop sign which could be fun to just randomly pop out around town. And, if the payments get hard, we could always supplement our income by undercutting the fees the school district charges parents to bus their kids. But it wouldn't fit into our garage, and I didn't feel like getting the special bus driver, driver's license.

So finally we settled on this: A 2008 Toyota Sienna in a very pretty green color (All the boys hate the color, the girls love it. I won in the color battle.)

It was delivered to us last night. Now I will just live in fear of anything happening to it. We have already threatened the kids with bodily harm if they so much as get a drop or crumb or mark of any kind on it for the next 10 years. (Only sort of kidding, maybe not bodily harm, but definitely some kind of torment). And I get to spend the next couple of days figuring out how to work all the cool little extras that came with. What a great excuse not to do housework.

My new conflict

I have a new source of conflict in my life. I feel like I am in a huge struggle with this object. It is kind of like a little war with battles. Over the last week, things have really been escalating. You see, 9 years and 10 months ago, after moving to Brentwood, we purchased this 1 year old used minivan, after realizing that with Andrew going to Livermore to work, we just could not get by on one car anymore.This is the car we used to bring all three girls home from the hospital when they were born. This car has taken us on many trips to Washington, Utah, and other places for vacations. With it's handy movable seats, we were able to buy a second third row seat from a junkyard and make it carry 8 passengers, securing it's survival with our family after the birth of our last child, over four years ago. It has carried our kids to many swim meets, to pre-school, to church each week. It has been with us for a long time.

It has developed lots of little quirky problems, like the gas light and dinger randomly chiming when the tank is full, like the windshield wipers just arbitrarily taking a wipe. Like the speedometer not registering motion on occasion. These kinds of things just give it personality. They are nothing big.

Lately it seems to be deciding it no longer wants to live with us. Maybe it wants a quieter life, maybe it wants to be put to rest. Last week it upped the ante, when it tried to strand me on 580 while going to the temple. It decided to leak out all its coolant and overheat. Fortunately, my dad was with me at the time, and he was able to save me. Now I have to drive around with a gallon of water and anti-freeze, and frequently check to make sure it isn't trying to pull this little stunt again. Not happy with this result, it decided that instead of letting the blinker come on, it would light up the brake light, when I tried to signal for a turn, and occasionaly refuse to shift gears when I am trying to accelerate.

So here is my dilemna, do I continue to fight with this van, and exert my will over it, knowing that it is upping the ante, and may just do some horrible thing and cause me to be stranded somewhere, or do I give it up, and hope we can find a new vehicle to join our family. Both options cause me much turmoil.

If we keep the van, I will always be stressed and worried that every little noise is a sign of some horrible thing about to happen. However, I won't be so worried about messes in the van. If we get something new, I will be constantly worried about everything around me as I drive, being out to mark it up, I will be worried about anything getting in it, (no food or beverages, other than water, even on long cross-country trips for those messy kids). I will stress that the kids might somehow do something to it. Andrew will be constantly worried about the side-view mirrors, and the side of our garage (ok, he already is, but at least now one is already damaged). I will feel guilty anytime I spend extra money on something not really necessary that could be going to pay off the new vehicle. I will feel greedy wanting anything for Christmas.

If we get a new van, does that mean that our old one wins, or do I win?

Can you guess what this is?

Halloween pics a little late

Lively Link aka Travis

The Great Gimli also known as Kyle

A beautiful bride Mindy

The fancy fairy Sandra

and an adorable angel Cammie

Mindy and Claire decided to go as twin brides. They even were asked if they were twins while out trick-or-treating. Aren't they just so cute together. To bad twin day at school was two days later, and we wouldn't let them wear their costumes again.

Here is the answer. A gigantic Tootsie Roll. Mindy decided to mash all her tootsie rolls into one large one. My kids are a little weird. This is what they do instead of sorting out and categorizing their halloween candy.