Pictures from November

 I need to do 2 separate November posts (Grant's birthday and Tyson's wedding), but this posts should encompass the rest of our November.

 Grant was playing ball and threw it into the pool.  Adam told him he would give him a dollar if he went in the pool to get it.  It was the funniest thing - he marched into the house, put on his suit and then came outside ready to swim.  We thought he would hesitate and stay on the stairs, but he walked out the sliding door, walked over to the pool and immediately jumped in, swam to the ball and swam back to the stairs.  It was crazy, not even a moments hesitation.  Noah and Ava thought it looked fun, so they joined him.  They all swam for about 5 minutes before declaring it was too cold.  I couldn't believe they actually did it.

 My kids are surprisingly good at the dentist.  They actually love going.  I hated going to the dentist when I was little.

 Granty turned 5 in November.  The primary presidency brought over his birthday crown before we left for Moab.  The sword was a sweet Target find - 10 cents!  Got a few post Halloween toys (mainly swords) for 10-50 cents.

 My brother, Tyson, got married in Moab, Utah.  We flew to Salt Lake City and then drove down.  We stayed in Moab a couple days and then stayed in SLC for a few days. I'll do another post on Tyson's wedding - way too many pictures to add to this post.

 We really wanted to fly into Salt Lake so we could visit grandma and grandpa Ellis.  Grandpa has been having some heart problems and just had open heart surgery, so we wanted to check on him and see some of the other relatives.  I can't tell you how much I look up to grandma and grandpa Ellis.  They are the sweetest, most humble, amazing people I know.  I have NEVER been to grandma's house and not had a full cookie jar to raid.  Of course, we finished off what was in her cookie bucket, and immediately she just goes into the kitchen and whips up some more. 

 

Aida and her cute boys live in grandma's basement (Steve lives there too, but he wasn't home so we didn't get to see him), so my kids had a blast playing with them.  Aida's taking after grandma and is just so sweet and nice.  Scott stopped by to check on grandpa so we got to see uncle Scott for a few minutes too.  We knew we wouldn't be able to see all the relatives (one of the things I miss about living in Salt Lake was our weekly visits with family) in our short stay, but happy we got to see quite a few.

 We stayed at cousin Amanda's house.  Dex introduced my kids to the Wii.  They thought it was great.  Mike and Amanda have almost an identical family situation as us (1 older boy and then twins, boy and girl, a few years younger).  They are great parents.  It was fun to watch them with their kids. They are just getting to that very trying stage (2 year old twins is rough) of child rearing.  Adam and I commented on how quickly we forgot about how our life was when our kids were at that age.  Amazing how much changes, in all aspects of life, as your kids pass through each stage.  Anyway, it was fun staying with them.  We got to see cousin Jodilynn (also their nanny), and stayed up way too late chatting with Caitlin.  Thanks Caitlin for the fun and intellectual conversation.  It made us feel young again.  :)  We went and saw the Deaners new house, and got to see our boy Braden (and Hannah and Olivia).  My kids want to move into their playhouse downstairs.

 On our last day we were going to stop by aunt Chris', but Grant was starting to not feel good.  We called aunt Nancy to tell her we couldn't come out to ride the train and she promised she didn't care if we were sick. HUH?!?!  We had been telling the kids all about the train for months before, and they really wanted to try it.  Nancy and Medardo are awesome. I want to be like Nancy someday.  See a recurring theme?  The Ellis family is an incredible family.   Next time we'll have to plan on staying longer so we can visit with everyone. 

This trip was pretty bad as far as bodily fluid accidents.  I don't know what was going on, but Ava peed her pants 2 times at 2 different peoples houses!!  Seriously!  Sorry Deaners (luckily she was on the hard wood floors so it was easy to clean up - brand new house mind you).  We stopped by our friends house for a few minutes and she had an accident on their carpet.  So embarrassing.  Grant puked from coughing so much (every winter he gets a cough that lasts for months, and he throws up when he coughs) on our drive to Moab. He got a bloody nose at Amanda's house.  He wasn't feeling well the day we were flying home and threw up while we were in line to get sandwiches with Rachelle.  I know Rachelle REALLY didn't want to be around us after that, but she was sweet and let us go back to her apartment to eat lunch before going to the airport.   I think Grant had an accident during the trip once too, but I can't remember.  I lost track.  I don't know what was wrong with those 2 - they have a very bad habit of waiting until the last second and by then they don't have time to ask where the bathroom is.  Needless to say, we had a lot of nasty dirty clothes to wash when we got home.

 Noah got another belt promotion.  He's now a purple belt.

 Thought Ava looked so cute in her cowgirl outfit.   We love cute hand-me-downs.

 A couple weeks ago it was raining pretty hard for a few days here, so we thought maybe there would be snow up I-80.  We took a drive and didn't find any snow.  We were almost to Lake Tahoe, so decided to check out the lake. Believe it or not, I had never been to Lake Tahoe since moving here.  We're only 1 1/2 hours from Lake Tahoe, but for some reason hadn't ventured that direction.

 Rock towers on the beach.

 Mandarin picking.  I know I brag every winter about the mandarins, but seriously people the mandarins here are amazing. I can never eat a Cutie again.

 Somehow Ava ended up barefoot for most of this outing.

 Weighing our mandarins.  Cool old scale I would love to have.

 Huge mandarins

 We went on a little hike around the mandarin orchard.

Ava comes up with the strangest outfits.

 Uncle Eli came for Thanksgiving and brought his hammock.  The palm trees were the strongest trees to anchor it to.  I was hoping someone would fall into the pool, but that didn't happen.

 When Eli got in the hammock he got pretty darn close to the water.

 Thanksgiving dinner was phenom.  I made EVERYTHING from scratch (minus the Jell-O), even the marshmallows for this sweet potato souffle.  I tried a couple new recipes this year that are keepers, so I'll try to get those up on my recipe blog soon.

It was really warm on Thanksgiving so we had our feast outside this year.  The kids ate theirs in the playhouse at the top of the slide.  We invited everyone we knew to come over for dinner, but we only ended up with 1 extra person (besides Eli).  We had a few families say they might come over if they didn't leave town, and another family that was going to come if the mom didn't have a baby (she ended up having her that night), but they all ended up going out of town.  Needless to say, we had A LOT of left overs.  Kept us fed for the rest of the weekend.