We had a great Thanksgiving. We drove to Tooele to Jon and Jaime's new house where we all gathered with Tom and Lorna before they left on their mission. Their house is beautiful! We made it around 2am and had fun the first morning taking it easy. This cutie warmed up to Joe pretty fast:
We had a fun kids talent show one night. We've got some talented grandkids!
James sang a song and told jokes:
Lily and Joelle were flipping all over the place:
Maddy sang an adorable song:
Randon played his cello:
He's a natural musician!
Jace did some awesome karate moves:
Nate showed off his ninja warrior skills:
Eli did some of his cool spin moves:
Maggie did some gymnastics too:
Todd drew an awesome picture of a turkey:
Elizabeth, Natalie, and Joelle and Randon played on the piano:
I sure loved listening to my girls play Christmas songs this year. They are getting so good.
One night, everyone went out to the movies to either see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them or Trolls. Eli didn't want to see either so I stayed home with him and Toni stayed home with Archer. We decided to go to McDonald's for dessert and to play in the play place.
Archer cracked us up by sticking his whole cone in his mouth so he could do play:
We also celebrated the nearby birthdays:
Some other cute moments:
Eli spent the whole trip trying to choke everyone with his sith powers:
Maddy getting him back:
We had a little bit of good time with Tom and Lorna. They were busy and stressed getting everything ready before they left on their mission to Chile but I'm glad we had that time with them.
It was a great trip. We got up early to leave for home Sunday morning hoping to beat any bad weather over Donner Pass. It turned out that we should have just slept in. We were doing fine, there was some snow but the roads weren't too bad. We got through a tough spot fine and were just happily driving along, listening to Christmas songs when we suddenly slid and couldn't recover. We hit the front of our car on the left cement median, then spun and hit the back of our car on the right cement barrier. It was terrifying of course and the kids were so so scared but I was of course just so grateful that we were all in one piece. Joe hopped right out of the car to warn oncoming traffic. Soon after, when it was just the kids and I in the car, Natalie suggested we say a prayer so I did and just felt so overwhelmed with gratitude that we were OK. There were so many things to be grateful for in this experience. Here are some of them:
-Everyone was wearing their seat belts. Sometimes the kids get unbuckled without us knowing and I was just so grateful that hadn't happened.
-There were cement barriers there so we didn't go off the road. Only about 70 feet earlier there weren't any.
-So many kind people stopped to help us. They let our kids sit in their cars instead of standing out in the snow. I didn't even have good jackets for everyone so I was so grateful. They gave our kids gatorade and snacks and just talked to them.
-One couple--Nate and Melissa Waite--one of the first people to stop turned out to be LDS. They saw our BYU sweatshirts. Their son was serving in Chile on a mission! They lived in the Nevada and they delayed their trip for about 3 hours so they could drive some of us back to the tow place, while the rest of us rode in the tow truck. They were both teachers and were so kind. I just felt overwhelmed thinking about their kindness and we were all so grateful.
So, we drove to the tow place, where thankfully a rental car place offered to pick us up to take us to rent a car. At first we thought there wouldn't be a car big enough for us but thankfully we found one. After renting that car, we were back on our way. We stopped to get lunch at Costa Vida in Elko since we were all starving by that point and we had a good talk about everything. We even laughed a lot thinking about "Mele Kalikimaka" playing while all that was happening. It was healing and I'm glad we took that time to talk.
Here are the pictures of our poor gray van:
That dent is not far from where Nate was sitting in the back. So thankful that all he ended up with was a goose-egg on his head and nothing worse.
It was not the way I expected Thanksgiving to end, but it sure made me extra grateful for my family and all of our blessings. It was such a relief to make it home safely that night. We all took the next day off recovering from whiplash and other pains. It was a process but we all healed well. After a few weeks of figuring things out with just our Civic, we were able to get a new van and now things are back to normal. It's funny how fast life gets back to normal after traumatic events like that. I hope we can always remember and be grateful for each other and God's blessings and protection in difficult times.
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