Thanksgiving

We had a fantastic Thanksgiving week. Richie was off work the Wednesday before which allowed me to squeeze in some window painting before leaving later that day. We're still loving the fact that in order to get to St. George we only have to drive 4 hours, as opposed to 8. The kids are pretty darn good travelers, especially if we play our cards right, but 8 hours? C'mon.
This year, the extended Crosby fam all got together to celebrate Grandma Crosby's 90th birthday, in addition to Thanksgiving. Because of the size of our group, we held the actual meal and other meet ups at churches and had the feast catered. The food was good, but we were missing some leftovers when we got home. Luckily our sweet neighbors got sick of eating leftover turkey and brought us 2 bags full. :) I don't think I'm going to attempt getting the pictures lined up with the right captions, but you get the idea right? Henry and all the other cousins were amazing play mates for my kids. Miles cried all of Sunday because he didn't want to leave his friends and St. George. They had so much fun with their cousins, which is such a plus for me in many ways. We watched silly amounts of TV, ate crazy good food, chatted it up with the fam...it's was pretty much everything you'd expect out of a perfect Thanksgiving get together.
My mom has a tradition of having a grandkids sleepover every year after Thanksgiving so that the parents can go out shopping without the kids. Richie and I didn't want to brave any crowds, so we just stuck around the sleepover and got to participate in all the activities. My mom showed them the story of the Berlin Candy Bomber before going to bed on Friday. On Saturday morning, after chocolate chip pancakes, she helped all the kids make parachutes from garbage bags and balsa wood airplanes. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they could have been plenty entertained with those all day. But afterwards, we met up at a tiny airstrip for people who have remote control airplanes to fly. She had arranged for one of the planes to drop tiny candy parachutes as it flew over us. It was a surprise to the kids and the audible gasp when they realized what was happening was priceless. The plane owners even let us "fly" the planes. Miles and Gwen thought that was pretty cool. Thanks mom and dad!
There are small things I hope my kids remember about certain events, or even just a general feeling they get when we take trips like this, but I'm pretty sure that they're small enough not to remember a lot of this. That's why I blog! I hope when they're 27 with kids of their own, they still remember reading the Sunday comics with Grandpa, the M&M candy "machine", making crafts with Grandma, Gwen being in girl heaven with all of Erma's barbies and dress ups, taking baths in the big tub, running around wild with cousins, Miles telling me he's "furious" and then apologizing for being grumpy, and all those other wonderful things. If they don't remember though, at least we've got some documentation here.