Thanksgiving Vacation

Our Thanksgiving Break was so great. Here's the run down. 

On Monday I slept in and then went to work around 11:00 and stayed for 4. I was trying to get on top of things before I started slacking off later in the week. But I never really slacked off. I always aim for working at least 12 hours each week. This week I worked 11 hours and 20 minutes. 

I'd left instructions for the kids to wash the dishes before I came home. They were just finishing those up when I walked in the door. 

I took the girls to get hair cuts. Everyone needed to get their dead split ends trimmed off. Veronica and Charlotte had been having trouble with lots of tangles from their dead ends. So they all got trims. Nothing drastic, but it definitely helped. 

The big goal for the afternoon was to get the stair rail finished. So when Brandon came home from work we started working on that. I brought everything into the house. 

Then Brandon started putting it all together with his nail gun. 

Everything went together really quick. After three Saturdays of piecing this thing together and waiting for things to dry it was AMAZING to finally see the vision become reality. 

Look how beautiful it is!

Here's how it looks with everything back in place. 

And just as a reminder, this is what this area used to look like when the wall was still here. It feels like a completely different house. 

Here it is from another angle. I don't even have a "before" picture of this area because there was nothing to look at here. It was just a wall and a door and a dim stairwell.

And here's the view from the bottom of the stairs. 

We had dinner and then went to our friend Kori's house for a game night. She'd really really wanted me to come. The party originally had been planned for Tuesday night, but that was going to be a really busy night for me and I said we'd maybe make it. Then her husband Tyson had to have surgery on his hand on Tuesday morning. So they moved the party to Monday. And that actually worked so much better for our family. 

The party was so fun. Kori has 5 kids. Her oldest two are Derrick and Veronica's ages. Jori and Tim were their with their four girls. Shaylee and Brad were their with their four. And Hanah was there with her two boys. 

Everyone brought food to share. I brought rice crispy treats and stew because I'd made way too much on Sunday. 

We had fun chatting and then it was time to play Werewolves. This is a game kind of like Mafia. Tyson ran the game and told everyone when to wake up and what to do. He did a great job. 

Veronica hadn't wanted to play, but had been talked into it. She ended up being one of the few villagers who didn't die. She was so proud of that. I was originally the "Old Hag" who could choose one person to protect each night. But later I was turned into a werewolf. But I was still kind of the Old Hag. So I was living a double life choosing to protect one person each night and then voting with the other werewolves to kill someone. I was kind of relieved when I was accused of being a werewolf and got voted out. 

Everyone had a great time and I'm glad that Kori made such a big deal about wanting my family there. It was really fun. 

On Tuesday I went into work pretty early and stayed for about 3 hours. I have no memory of what I did, but I'm sure it was important. Actually, over these three days a lot of missing payments started to show up. So that was great. 

At home we cleaned up the living room really well. We even moved the couches and swept under the rug. We were cleaning for two reasons. 1. We wanted to set up the Christmas stuff. And 2. We were hosting a party for Brandon's birthday on Sunday so we wanted everything to look nice. That's actually why we were decorating for Christmas so early. We wanted the decorations up for Brandon's party. 

We (mostly Charlotte) decorated all the new shelves with our Christmas stuff. We realized we needed more things because our top shelves were a little bare. 

Veronica needed black pants for her orchestra concert the next week. I didn't want to worry about that the next week so I took her to DI. While she was trying on pants I looked over at the dresses. I was surprised to see a dress that I'd tried on a few weeks ago still there. It was a green party dress. I'd tried it on when I was looking for a 4th wall dress for the Hello Girls night. It had fit perfectly, but it hadn't fit the vibe and so I'd picked the long black dress. But later I regretted not buying that green dress. It would have been perfect for Christmas. So when I saw that it was still there I went and bought it. It's a steal at $6. 

After dinner we set up the tree with Brandon's help and then I supervised putting all the ornaments on the tree. 

And since we were so busy I never paused to take a picture of everything all decorated. 

We also packed for our trip to Utah. And Brandon made four dozen crescent rolls. He'd also been baking pies for like 3 days already. He made 7 pies total. Including a key lime pie as a surprise for Jori and Tim.

I tapped out around 9:30. I don't know how late Brandon was up cooking with Charlotte and Lydia. (I do know that one night they'd been up until 12:30 cooking, but I can't remember which night that was.)

On Wednesday I was up with Brandon at 5:30. I had a big shopping list and went to Winco at 6:00 AM. Brandon was on top of the Thanksgiving stuff, but I was worrying about all the other things. My list included things for his birthday party on Sunday, food we'd eat on the other days we were in Utah, and food for at least a few days of December. There was a lot of random stuff in my cart. 

Then I came home and unloaded everything onto the table. I sorted it out by putting all the party food on one side of the table and all the travel food on the other side of the table. 

I packed my clothes for Utah. I went to work for about 2 hours and got things to where I was okay leaving them for a few days. 

Back at home the kids helped me pack the car. They had cleaned up the basement really well while I was at work. 

I'd been hoping to get the bathrooms all clean and the kitchen floor mopped, but we just didn't have any time.  

Brandon got home around 3:00 and we all got into the car. Lydia drove. I sat next to her with four pies n the pie safe in my lap. Brandon had a huge tray of rolls on his lap. We also had our food crate, our big freezer bag full of food, and all our bags. I told Lydia, "you're going to feel all this weight when you push on the breaks."  And she did. 

She did a great job driving to the Idaho/Utah border. Her Idaho learners permit isn't valid in Utah so we switched and I took over driving. 

We were going to have frozen pizzas at our destination. But I realized those don't travel well. So I moved those to be dinner when we got back on Saturday. Instead we went to Burger King in Brigham City. Derrick had found the coupons in the mail and kept pointing out what good deals they were. So we brought those coupons and used them. Brandon somehow lost track of everything he ordered so there was an extra soda. Charlotte got too sodas and drank them like this. 

Everyone was very happy at Burger King. It was a fun way to kick off our vacation. And the key word here was VACATION.  We were going to Utah to spend Thanksgiving with Brandon's family. But we were not staying with his parents. I've decided that if I'm taking off time from work and travelling then I want it to feel like a vacation and not an obligation. And that meant staying somewhere on our own.

At first I'd considered getting a hotel or something in Ogden, but then I looked up vacation homes near Brandon's parents. I wanted to be close so he could still easily visit his parents, but none of us had to stay there overnight. His parents live really close to Wolf Creek which has a ton of condos that are rented out. There were so many places to choose from. 

Charlotte helped me pick out which one we wanted. She liked the one called "Mountain Mischief" because it had a cabin feel - even though it was a condo. Getting a condo for three nights was probably cheaper than hotel rooms would have been. And we'd have a kitchen so we could cook our own food.  

We arrived after dark, but this is what our condo looked like in the daylight. This area was just south of the official "Wolf Creek" area. We were in a small development called Moose Hollow. 

Other sections of the community had a lot of cars and people. But our area was pretty deserted. I think this area has a lot of vacation homes that aren't owned by families. They weren't as in demand because there wasn't any snow yet. But I kind of wondered what all these stairs would be like if there was snow. 

Inside there was a type of lobby with four doors going off of it. Our door was at the top of a stair case. Notice the Moose Antler chandelier. 

Inside we were greeted by a cute living room and kitchen. 

There was a bedroom on the first floor for me and Brandon. There was also a bathroom on this floor. 

Here's another view of the kitchen and living room. 

The doors opened onto a balcony. This was the view from the balcony.

Upstairs there was another bathroom and a large bedroom. This room had a queen bed and a day bed with a trundle. The twins got the queen bed. Veronica had the day bed. and Derrick had the trundle. There was a TV up here so every night they stayed up watching things. 

I liked this little decoration in the bathroom. It said, "Friends Welcome. Relatives by Appointment." That was kind of the whole plan with staying in this home. 

There was a smoke alarm at the very top of the stair case. It's batteries must have been dying because it was chirping every 5 or so minutes. I called the vacation home number and the lady who answered said she would send someone out. That person texted me and said it would be about an hour. 

Brandon took the girls to his parents house. I stayed at the vacation home with Derrick. We had plans for a poster project. He'd been reading dinosaur facts to me for months and I was getting really bored of just listening to the facts. I wanted to do some data organizing. So we decided to do a poster of the different geology eras and then put the name of each dinosaur into the era where they lived. 

So I drew out a cross section of the eras. Derrick looked at the picture I was using as reference and spelled all the eras for me. Then we went to work on the dinosaurs. He had his original dinosaur list. He'd use that to keep track of which dinosaurs we should look up. He'd look up a dinosaur on his tablet and tell me how to spell it. I would write it down. Then he would cut it out and tape the name on the poster in the correct era. 

He would read me the stats about how big the dinosaur was and how much it weighted. He also had his tape measure so we could see how big it was. 

We worked on this project for at least an hour and a half. We were both so content to do this. It was also really funny how many dinosaurs lived in the late cretaceous. We quickly realized that's where most of them lived and we were going to run out of room. 

The maintenance guy and his wife came to change the batteries. They'd brought a big ladder with adjustable legs so they could set it up on the stairs. They had the batteries changed very quickly. Derrick told them a few dinosaur facts and then they left. 

Brandon and the girls came home a little after that. Everyone got ready for bed. The kids stayed up watching "Free Birds." Brandon and I read a little bit of "Into Thin Air," but we didn't make it far because Brandon was so sleepy. 

On Thursday morning Brandon and I woke up around 7:00 and I drove him over to his parents and dropped him off. He would help his mom get the turkey in the oven. I went back home and took a shower and basked in being in my own space. I was trying to put into words how I felt. The best way to describe it was that I enjoyed not being observed. It was nice to take a long shower without wondering if my kids were up and bothering anyone. It was nice to just get back into pajamas after taking the shower because I didn't have to look nice for anyone. It was nice to just get on my laptop and log into work for about 45 minutes without feeling like I was looking rude. It was nice to just be. 

I'd been concerned there wouldn't be enough rolls at dinner so I'd bought rhodes dough rolls. I put those on cookie sheets that the vacation home had. They rose all morning. 

Around 9:00 I turned on the parade - which was kind of silly because we were watching it live via Peacock. So it had been going on for two hours already. I had to "rewind" the streaming feed back to the beginning. The kids gradually got up and joined me. We were all just kind of zoned out watching the parade. There were commercial breaks where the screen would just show New York scenery for like 3 minutes. We just watched those and never realized we could fast forward them. 

I had all the kids take showers. I promised to pause the parade if the K-Pop Demon Hunters came on. That's what we were really waiting for - to watch the three singers behind K-Pop Demon Hunters sing Golden. 

Around 11:00 the girls all wanted to go to their Grandparents house, but we still hadn't seen K-Pop Demon Hunters in the parade yet. And that's when we remembered we had the power to fast forward the parade. So we did that and found that part and watched it. And WOW it was so good. Definitely worth waiting for. 

Then I took the girls over to Steve and Jacques house. Derrick stayed with me. He wanted to find the gym at the club house. So we went to find that. He ran on the tread mill for like 5 minutes. 

And then did the bow flex machine. 

Then we went back to the vacation home and worked on the poster for about 45 minutes while I cooked 3 dozen rolls. 

We finished up all the carnivores on the list. Derrick was so excited to show the poster off to everyone in the family. 

I made green bean casserole and put that in the oven while I got dressed and did my make up. Derrick watched some Youtube videos about dinosaurs on the TV. When I was ready and when the casserole was ready Derrick helped me get the food to the car. We drove over to my inlaws and arrived a little after Melanie wat there with her family. Shannon showed up a little after we got there. 

There were just a few finishing touches to do and then it was time to eat. We started with the traditional layered jello. 

Then everything got passed around. 

I had the greenbean casserole next to me and ate a lot of that. 

Here's a picture of Derrick with Steve. Derrick looks a little annoyed, but he was actually really happy. Normally by the time we are eating on Thanksgiving he's been holding it together for hours and basically melts down when it's time to eat. But this year he'd had so much time on his own that he was in peek Derrick form at dinner time. It was so fun to eat with him. And then he politely asked to be excused.  

Brandon and I were able to sit together. Here we are. I'm so thankful for him. I wouldn't have a clue how to feed a crowd for Thanksgiving. But he makes it look easy. 

I was so proud of Brandon's siblings this year. They actually sat around and talked for about 15 minutes after everyone was done eating before jumping up and cleaning up. 

We played games and I started a puzzle and several hours later we had lots of pies. Brandon brought a pumpkin pie, a berry pie, a mincemeat pie, and a pecan pie. 

Everyone hung around until about 8:00. Shannon's family left and a little later our family left with Melanie's family close behind. My family was eager to get back to the vacation home so we could try out the hot tub. It felt really nice. 

Here I am. 

This is what our condo looked like from the outside. 

And here's what the hot tub looked like from our balcony. 

We stayed out there for about 30 minutes and then came inside and got ready for bed. The kids watched another movie. Brandon and I read a lot of Into Thin Air. We were at the exciting and terrible part where the storm rolls in and 14 people are still on the mountain trying to get to Camp Four. 

On Friday morning we woke up to a beautiful morning. 

Look at that sky. 

We got ready for the day. It would have been nice to hang around the vacation home, but honestly, it was slightly too small for all 6 of us. Also Derrick had planned the day for us. Months earlier he'd seen pictures of the Utah Museum of Natural History. I told him we should go next time we were in Utah. And that was now. 

So we got ready to be gone for the day. This is when I discovered another wonderful thing about staying in a vacation home instead of with family - we didn't have to make awkward small talk for 30 minutes so it didn't appear rude when we left. So we actually were ahead of schedule as we left the vacation home a little after 9:00. 

We made a quick stop at Emily's so I could drop off some left over pies. We were going to have dinner with her that evening and we didn't want to drive around with pies all day. 

Then we drove to the University of Utah. As we drove up 400 South in Salt Lake a Trax Train drove by our car. The kids thought that was so cool.

We arrived at the museum and I paid for our tickets. It was kind of pricy and I was thinking, "this better be worth it."  Thankfully it was!  

I'd been to this museum when I was 15 and it was in a different location. I remember it as kind of boring. But this version of the museum had really cool displays. It started with this huge wall of things on display.  

There was also this big map of Utah. 

Then we went into the actual display areas. We passed a lab with real scientists at work. 

Derrick was so excited for the fossils on display. 

He recognized this as a Lokiseratops right away. 

Look at how many different things they had. 

I liked this recreation of a dino dig site. We walked on glass over the dig site. 

There were so many dinosaur fossils. 

Everything looked really cool.

This Allosaurus was pretty cool.

More quarries under our feet. 

This whole long hall was full of dinosaurs. 

We walked on a ramp that slowly took us past all the dinosaurs. Then we came to a display about the Great Salt Lake. They had real brine shrimp in a tank. 

Then we moved into an area about ancient inhabitants of Utah. 

Then there were some displays about geology. We liked this erosion table. 

Here's another cool fossil. 

We'd been gradually moving up the whole time. We came to the 4th floor which was all about ecology. They had an ant farm in this dome. 

Then we went up this cool stair case that overlooked the lobby.

Here's the view. When we'd first arrived this had seemed so far away. 

That took us to the 5th floor which had roof access. 

Here are the kids looking out at everything. 

Then we went back down and took the elevator down to the third floor. This part of the 3rd floor had gems and crystals on display. 

Veronica was in love with this area. 

We could also see into the storage area. 

There was a special exhibit about the Ice Age, but I was pretty burned out on everything so I mostly sat on a wonderful bench while the kids ran around. 

Then we stopped at the gift shop and then we were done. He we are leaving. 

At the car we had "lunch."  Let me preface this by reminding you all that I went shopping on Wednesday morning for like three different events. So buying food for while we were in Utah ended up a little overshadowed. I bought oreos, nutty bars, and granola bars with the idea that we'd have one of them each day along with other things. But I never really bought the other things. I never really had a plan for these "other things." So lunch ended up being oreos, nutty bars, AND granola bars all at once. We did also have some cups of fruit and string cheese, but yeah, not the most well rounded meal. 

After "lunch" we went to my parents apartment in Taylorsville. On our way down to Salt Lake that mornings we'd been trying to figure out the last time we'd all been down to Salt Lake together. I'd been there in September when I climbed Timp, but Brandon hadn't been with me. We realized we hadn't been in Salt Lake or my parents apartment since Christmas Eve 2023 - nearly 2 years ago!

My parents took us up to the game room and the kids had fun playing pool. I worked on a puzzle with my mom. Charlotte helped a little bit, but she was puzzled out. She done like 5 puzzles at our house. Lydia helped too. 

Here it is all done. 

The puzzle took us under 2 hours to do. Then it was time to get going. We were planning to be at Emily's for dinner at 5:00. So we said goodbye to my parents and drove up to Emily's. 

Emily had tacos for dinner. She'd made brookies (brownies and cookies) for dessert and we had our left over pie. We had a good time at her house. 

Then we went back to the vacation home and spent another 30 minutes in the hot tub. This time there were 3 other people in the hot tub. But we still had a nice time. 

After we were back in the house I did a load of laundry with the kids swimming suits and some of the towels. The washer and dryer were in a closet off of the big room so I was hanging out in there so I wouldn't forget to move the laundry. 

The kids were all lined up on the big bed watching Studio C sketches. 

It was adorable to see them all close like this. 

By the time I was back downstairs Brandon was asleep. So we didn't read. 

On Saturday I was up before everyone else. I was writing on my computer. I thought check out time was 11:00. But I noticed a reminder email saying it was really at 10:00. So that kind of sped up our morning a bit. 

We woke the kids up around 9:00 and everyone ate breakfast. (I did do well on breakfast food. We had cereal, eggs, and yogurt.) Then everyone packed up their stuff. The only cleaning jobs we had to do were to take the sheets off the beds and put them by the washing machine and to start the dishwasher. 

We took the garbage to the dumpster. Brandon raced the kids back up the hill.  

Here's a final view of our beautiful vacation home. This was such a good idea. Years ago Derrick had told me he wanted to stay in a cabin in the mountains with a hot tub. He's brought it up every so often since then. So this finally checked that box. (In case you can't tell, Derrick loves to plan things about as much as I do. The two of us are the driving force behind half of our vacations.)

Our plan for the day was to go see a matinee showing of Zootopia 2 at a theatre in North Ogden. But that didn't start until 11:45 and so we had about an hour to kill. So we went to down town Ogden to look at the Christmas village. They would light it up that evening, but everything was already set up. 

I liked this one with lots of Nutcrackers. 

And these little mice are always a favorite. 

Charlotte and Lydia posed with this bear. 

The kids were hungry and we still had a little time when we were done with the village so we went to Smiths Market Place and I bought apples and rolls. Those were eaten really quickly. 

Then we went to the movie theatre. Veronica had been begging to see Zootopia 2 when it came out. It's really expensive to see a movie in Twin Falls. We only have one theatre so they can kind of jack up the prices. We never have $5 Tuesdays or anything like that. And our matinee shows are $10. So for us to see a movie as a family in Twin Falls is $60 at the cheapest price. 

But in North Ogden the matinee price was only $8. And if we bought tickets in person there wasn't a convivence fee. So we could see the movie as a family for only $48. Which I know is only $12 less, but hey that total starts with a 4 instead of a 6 so it feels like a lot of savings. 

Veronica was so excited! As we waited for the previews to start she kept asking me what time it was. I was passing the time by getting on hotels.com and booking our stay for Christmas. We are only staying one night so the vacation home wouldn't work as well. But a hotel in downtown Ogden where we could see the village all lit up AND go out to eat at our favorite pizza place sounded perfect. 

The movie finally started and Veronica was so happy. Actually all of us were. It was a funny movie. I laughed a lot and enjoyed it quite a bit.

Here we all are before the movie. 

Veronica wanted to do a twin picture. 

After the movie was over we started driving home to Idaho. Brandon drove to the boarder and then Charlotte took over. She did great. 

We got home around 4:30. Marsha was so happy to see us. She'd stayed by herself and our friend Heather came to check on her a few times a day. 

We cooked the frozen pizza and then watched A Christmas Story Christmas. This was the sequel to A Christmas Story. It came out 2 years ago and has Peter Billingsley playing a grown up Ralphie. It was really sweet and I was crying at the end. 

I used to never understand A Christmas Story, but now it's pretty much guaranteed to bring me to tears. 

Then I started crying again because I made habanero pepper jelly. I'd diced all the peppers back in like September and even bought orange peppers and diced those. But I hadn't had time to actually make the jelly so I'd just put them in the freezer. I really wanted the jelly served on cream cheese at Brandon's party so this was my last chance to make the jelly. I thawed everything out and would cough and tear up every time I breathed in the fumes from the peppers. The whole house kind of smelled awful. But the jelly tasted great so it was worth it. 

On Sunday we got up and finally cleaned those bathrooms and mopped the kitchen floor. We went to church. Our friend Oakley was home from his mission and gave a talk. He also played his guitar. 

I left after sacrament meeting because there were a million things to do at home. I put everything together for chicken noodle soup, chopped veggies for a veggie tray and pulled out all the food for Brandon to use for a charcuterie board. 

When Brandon came home he went to work on that charcuterie board. This was the charcuterie board of his dreams. But also kind of my dreams because I'd bought everything. 

Here's the larger spread with the veggie tray, the habinero pepper jam, and PIES.  Brandon had made another pumpkin, a key lime, and a chocolate. Our friend Nate and Kerry brought another pumpkin left over from their thanksgiving. 

And here are the drinks. We just had crystal light punch and water. 

The party was great!  Nate, Kerri and Payton were the first to arrive. Joe and his 5 kids came next. (Megan stayed home to make dinner.) Nate works at the hospital running data cables. Joe works at the hospital as a doctor. I introduced them to each other and joked that Joe might recognize Nate's legs because he's always standing on ladders fixing cabled in the ceiling. 

Our friend Cami came with her grown up daughter and her baby grandson. Cami brought a rolling pin with depth gauges as a present. Brandon says, "this looks like a rolling pin for an aircraft mechanic."

Rachel, Ethan, and their son Turner came next. Makeesa came around this time as well. Nate, Rachel, and Makeesa were all in Music Man with Brandon. I thought about how we all had little tiny conversations at the cast party. I barely knew any of them. And our friendship really didn't move past small talk. But here we all were 2 and a half years later having a party in my house. I'd been in a play with them all too. They all felt like family. 

People stayed as long as they could and then left to do other things. So there was a lot of churn. 

Our next round of guests were all from our ward. Jeff and Lindsey and their 4 kids came at the same time as Brad and Olyvia and their 5 kids, AND Jori and Tim and their 4 kids. Our basement was suddenly overrun with children and I went down their to help with crown control while they found toys. I turned on Cinderella and that kept most of them entertained. So I went back upstairs. 

I refilled a few things on the charcuterie board. People were eating through everything just like I'd hoped. 

There was lots of good conversation. I love these friends. They are all so great. Veronica was telling everyone a new joke. (What do you call a book that is slippery?  A non- friction book.) And Jori said, "I hope you are writing these down."  Veronica said, "I am, because that guy gave me a book to write them in."  She pointed at Brad who said, "I love standup comedy and I have to support a budding artist when I find one."

Everyone was admiring our Christmas ornaments. I think a few people's brains exploded when we told them that 90% of the ornaments were hand painted by Brandon's mom. 

Jeff and Lindsey and Olyvia and Brad left after a while with all their kids in tow. But Jori and Tim stayed around. Kori and Tyson showed up a little later. Their kids were all at home either in bed or on their way there. We had more fun conversation. 

The party was supposed to be over at 7:00 and I'd told Derrick that we'd light the first candle on the Avent Wreath after the party. So at 7:00 he was very adamant that we light that candle - even though there were still people around. 

We decided to just include everyone. So we got the wreath out and lit the first candle. Then Derrick channeled his inner Sunday School teacher and was like, "This candle means Hope. Do you know what hope is? "  A few people answered and he was like, "Yes, that's right."  And then he started calling on people like, "Jori, do you know what hope is?"  And people answered. Jori said hope isn't a cute dove. It's a sewer rat that lives to see another day. 

The whole thing lasted less than 10 minutes but it was lovely. And I was so impressed by Derrick's ability to lead a discussion. I was like, "Where did this talent come from?"  Brandon says that's how Derrick teaches lessons in Priesthood when its his turn. Brandon writes down questions for Derrick to ask. 

I told everyone, we'll light another candle next week of you want to come back. 

Gradually everyone left and I cleaned up the dishes. It had been such a good party. Brandon had loved having so many people come by. He was saying we should do this every year. I agreed. 

And that sums up our Thanksgiving vacation. 

Thanks for reading.