Thanksgiving

Almost as soon we knew we were buying our house I started begging the Nielson family to come for Thanksgiving. I had grand ideas of how fun it would be. Even after I was pregnant and super sick I pictured this great week with lots of fun activities. Well, I was pretty much tired and lame the entire time, but we did get to have everyone at our house. We managed to squeeze in some fun around my grumpiness. Daniel, unfortunately, was gone both at the beginning and end of the trip. Such is life during basketball season.

The girls loved all the attention

On Wednesday had a girls afternoon and went shopping for wedding dresses for Courtney. Sadie was happy to offer opinions and advice.

Thanksgiving day was great. I did not do a single thing to help. Nothing. Tom and Carolyn prepared the entire meal and then other Nielsons cleaned up.

The morning after Thanksgiving we had another girls' outing to see Frozen. It was Elise's first time in a movie theater and she was absolutely mesmerized.

Saturday morning some people went to hike the Y. I really dislike that hike and the thought of carrying two children up while pregnant was not appealing so I declined. I included this picture to show that James, Courtney's fiance, came to Utah also. Sadie especially loves James, even if she cannot believe that his favorite color is brown.

Saturday afternoon Daniel had a game. We had a big family cheering section since several of Daniel's other relatives attended as well. The Cottles also came. The girls spent the game dancing and got on the jumbotron 3 or 4 times. Since this game Sadie's sole goal is to get on the "big tv" during games and she whines each time she doesn't appear.

 After the game we waited around so we could all go see Santa at the Riverwoods. Sadie was excited to tell Santa that she wanted a princess bike (which she has since changed to a Jasmine doll-too late) and Elise wanted nothing to do with him.

After the visit to Santa we grabbed some dinner, AKA the three kids ran around while the adults shoved dinner down our throats.
 We allowed the girls to ride the carousel one time and then headed home. Luckily Lexie thought to take a picture to prove that we actually spent some time together.

Sunday evening we went to the lights at Temple Square. The girls started off excited and then quickly melted down. Sadie tripped and hurt her knee. Elise didn't care about lights and wanted to throw leaves into fountains. That picture below is the best family photo we could get of the night. The girls trying to dive into the fountain with floating lights. The worst part was the drive home. Initially both girls were screaming, but then it turned into Sadie shrieking about hating everything and everyone, intermixed with random ear-piercing screams, until we were about 3 minutes from home. That's when she fell asleep.

Looking back over the week as I wrote this post I realize that we did much more than I originally thought. One of those nights (Saturday maybe?) we also went to a late showing of Catching Fire. Half-way through the movie Daniel leans over and tells me he had already seen the movie with his team on a roadtrip. The day everyone left we got a decent amount of snow, which made their drive to the airport extra fun.

Thank you so much for coming everyone! I will try to be more fun the next time you see me!