We had a great Thanksgiving. We hope you all did too. We had Thanksgiving as I mentioned earlier with my brother-in-law's mother-in-law. (My mom and dad.) It was great to be with Lena & Mike and their family as well as Sam, and Sheldon. Mike's parents and three of his siblings were there too. We were also joined by Michelle.



Dinner was "planned" to start at 1:00 pm. And amazingly enough, we started at 12:51!!! And if you know my family, that is amazing! I think it helped a lot that Lena wanted to eat closer to 11 am. We had a great dinner. Before dinner we did our traditional "I'm thankful for". Each person had three Indian corn kernels on their plate and said three things for which they were thankful. I love that!



Also that day we had ads from three papers to look at which was fun. (I love that part of Thanksgiving--looking at the ads.) Later that day we had the great Thanksgiving Day race. The kids ran one to the stop sign and back. Jon Erekson won. The next race for the adults was a mile long. And surprisingly, Sheldon won! (Just kidding...we knew that he would win.) Lee came in second!



After the race it was all about pies. YUM! After pie sampling, we got some family pictures--a yearly tradition for me and Lee, and our kids too. Thanks Mom & Michelle for taking the pictures.



A couple of movies also ran that day, Meet the Robinsons and Ratatouille. (Can't remember how to spell it.) I didn't see Meet the Robinsons but I have seen Ratatouille and it is a cute movie.



The rest of the weekend I went shopping a lot which was super fun. For the amount of "shopping" that I did, I didn't buy that much. Friday morning my mom got me up at 4:15 and we did a little shopping together. It was really fun going early, especially while the kids were sleeping. We got to Belk (like Dillards or JCPenny's) a little before 5 am. We were one of the first 250 people so we each got a $5 gift card. (We were hoping for that special one worth $5,000 but no such luck.) When I got home Lee went to the temple with Dad, Lena, Mike, and his parents.



Friday night we did a traditional Tim Tam chocolate-drinking fest. Sam brought some Tim Tams from Australia and shared some with us. Thanks Sam! Tim Tams are like a wafer cookie thing. There is a chocolate mousse type-of-thing in between two chocolate cookies. Then it is coated in chocolate. What you do is bite off each end, stick the Tim Tam in the hot chocolate and start sucking. The Tim Tam acts like a straw and in turn melts the chocolate mousse and the gets the cookies all warm and mushy. SO GOOD!

Saturday morning I went to the temple and that afternoon Lee watched the BYU game with Daniel, Sam, and Dad. While they did that I went shopping with Shanna and Cal.

We enjoyed seeing Daniel and Amy and their family Saturday night through Sunday night. They spent the night at my parents and we all went to church together Sunday at my parents' ward.



Lee had Monday off, so we didn't get home till Monday night. It was great having that extra day.



The weekend before Thanksgiving Lena and Mike and family stopped by and spent the weekend with us. We had a nice time and Clark LOVED it! He started crying when he found out that Jon was leaving. And he was happy again to find out that Jon would be at Grandma's for Thanksgiving.



Okay, the YouTube Republican debate is going on in the background so I am somewhat distracted. But I think I covered the main points. We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. It is such a fun holiday to get together with family, consider and give thanks for our blessings, relax and then start off the Christmas season the next day!



Only three more Sundays left here...the time is passing quickly. One more thing, last night Lee did FHE. He happened to notice that the recent-past and current First Presidency have the names of trains from Thomas the Tank Engine. First we sang Follow the Prophet (just the first two verses.) Then he pulled out the Gordon train, the Thomas train and the Henry train. He lined them up right next to each other. Then he hooked up the passenger coaches onto Gordon and talked about how we should follow the prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley. It went over pretty well. It was kind of tricky because Clark was asking about James. We weren't quite sure if he was asking about James E Faust or James the train. Well we told him that James (E.Faust) was dead and Clark got quite teary eyed and sad. We tried to explain that James the train was just fine--and James E Faust for that matter. Anyway, I don't know how James came up, but we had a good mini lesson about death and what happens after.