Happy Monday Blog Readers!

I didn't have any pictures of the girls for the blog, so I took some this morning. The outfits they are wearing I got for $2.00 each at Target. Yep, each piece was $1.00! Well, the shirts were $0.94 or something like that.


















A self-portrait of Cal by Cal


On Saturday Cal, Clark and I took a bus to Rolla, MO to see the Pixar movie Ratatouille. Afterwards we had pizza for lunch, saw real rats, the boys got a balloon animal, and Clark got a little rat made out of felt. Cal LOVED the rats. He was sad when we left. This whole trip was FREE. Even the ride on the bus and lunch! Thanks Armed Services YMCA!




Saturday after we got back I went grocery shopping and later we drove to Lebanon for the adult session of Stake Conference (about a 45 minutes away). The kids did pretty well. We just stayed in the foyer. While we were there we kept seeing two girls coming in and out of a nearby classroom. Towards the end of the meeting all of our kids, plus another little girl, ended up in the room. The girls were really nice and had fun with our kids. We both love going to the adult session of Stake Conference. We stopped and got a little treat and then headed home. We were sad about BYU loosing. I don't care if Utah gets to go to a BCS bowl or not. I still wish we would have beat them!

Sunday morning we returned to Lebanon, but this time not to a church building, but the local Civic Center for Stake Conference. For our church, congregations are divided up geographically. Depending on how many people live in a particular area that are members, the local congregation is called a brach--for a smaller congregation, or a ward--for a larger congregation. So many of these units, branches and wards, make up a Stake. I am not sure how many wards and branches are in our Stake, but usually it's about 10-14 branches and wards that are in the same Stake.

Twice a year, the whole Stake meets together for Stake Conference. We hear gospel messages from people in different wards and branches and also hear from the Presidency that is over the Stake. At our conference we also heard from the Mission President and his wife who are in charge of the missionaries in this area, and the Temple President and his wife who are over the St. Louis Temple. The meeting was good, our kids could have been better, but the people we sat next too were very sweet and understanding.

I think I have all the food that I need for Thanksgiving so I can avoid any last minute shopping trips. I am really liking the idea for future Thanksgivings of going out to eat or ordering pizza...

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We are so grateful for our wonderful family and friends!