Thanksgiving Greatness

Thanksgiving was a blast all together with our family!

The kids cleaned deer poop from Grandma's lawn.  It was like a treasure hunt!

They climbed rocks like goats.

The kids did some BB gun shooting for the first time.

Eliza did some dancing in her spare time.

Hey look, Annette got her photo taken.  Mom's never get that.

We went shooting which is a great Thanksgiving tradition.

It was tons of fun.

Elizabeth dressed up in all of the new dress up clothes Aunt Colleen brought.  This was her favorite by far.

The kids went in Grandma's hot tub.

The kids enjoyed themselves a lot.

We walked around Cabela's for fun.

The Austin girls taught Lizzy the fine art of raiding Grandma's closet of all of her fun dress up dresses.

Elizabeth "swam" as a mermaid across the floor and then she would become a princess.  She calls it her Ariel dress now.

Charlie joined in the dressing up with an awesome purple cape.

During Thanksgiving the guys went disc golfing and the adults did an escape room in Springville.  We went to actual Thanksgiving dinner with Charles' family and then had a Christmas party on Saturday morning with Charles family.

We had some family photos taken with everyone together.

They turned out amazing!!!

The kids loved taking the photos and love looking at the photos!

What a wonderful Thanksgiving!  It feels like heaven when we are all together.

Henry is a Whopping 5 Years Old!

Henry is such an amazing kid.  He LOVES having his photo taken.

He is always asking me to take his photo!

He loves to try new things and is very brave.

Henry has quite the imagination.

We all love hearing his awesome stories.

Henry loves dressing in a certain ways and has his favorite clothes.

He really loves his printed button up shirts.  Thankfully he is getting really good at buttons.

Henry loves hanging with Lizzy and loves taking photos with her.

Henry either wants to be a dentist or a brain surgeon.

We love Henry's wonderful, happy personality with an imagination that never ends.  He adds a wonderful dynamic to our family!  We love him so much.

Farm Animals Galore

Annette loves farm animals beyond belief.  She has some kind of relationship to them that isn't normal.  As a child she claimed she could communicate to animals, dogs specifically and she still claims it as an adult.  

Recently we were given the opportunity to take care of our friend's animals while they were away on vacation.  Annette LOVED it!  We didn't get nearly enough photos since we were actually working and not just goofing off.  Here is Charles milking the goat.  I really like that the goat looked back for the photo.  

Milking the goat was by far the hardest chore of all of the animals.  We would take turns to give our hands a rest.  After a few days Annette had enough hand muscle to do it by herself in the morning when Charles was at work.

One of the mornings we found a dead chicken that had drowned in the goats water basin.  That was fun to dispose of.  We got to collect the chicken eggs and feed the chicks, horses, goats, and alpacas.

Charles' sister, Angela, was taking care of someone else's farm animals at the same time and so we went and visited those animals.  Since we were goofing off we got lots of photos.

 The kids loved playing fetch with the dogs, but not nearly as much as the dogs loved playing it.  The dogs didn't want us to ever stop and would bark at us when we walked away.

Not all of the horses were good at selfies, but Sundance was.

The kids had a good warm up period with the animals before we dove right it.

The pigs were loud, noisy, and ugly.

For her age, Eliza was the least timid of all of the kids with the animals. 

Charlie did awesome as well.

Henry did get into it eventually.

Here one of the dogs is barking at Lizzy to play fetch with him.

Elizabeth loved the horses.  She has Annette's love of animals.  She will probably think she can communicate with them as well.

Henry is petting two horses at the same time.  He was so brave.

I was trying to take a picture of Angela, but the horse photobombed and made the picture even better.

The horses were hungry and kept encouraging Angela to feed them by eating her.

The kids stood right besides huge horses, but when it came to the indoor cat, boy was that scary.  Well, at least until she got picked up and was very friendly.

The fish tank were a big hit.

Charles got there a little late, but...


the horses obligingly all lined up to get patted.